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THOMAS CARLYLE 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



A STUDY OF HIS LITERARY 
APPRENTICESHIP 

1814-1831 



BY 



WILLIAM SAVAGE JOHNSON 




NEW HAVEN : YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON: HENRY FROWDE 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MCMXI 






Copyright, 1911 

BY 

Yale University Press 



Printed from tjrpe. 750 copies. September, 1911 



ki Xi^ 



'CI.A21)7897 



PREFACE 

The following essay is the result of a 
course in Carlyle and Emerson, given first 
at Yale University and later at the Univer- 
Xl^ sity of Kansas, in which Sartor Resartus 

was used as a text-book. In teaching this 
work it became evident that it could be 
appreciated properly only when studied, 
first, in relation to the social and economic 
conditions which produced it, and secondly, 
as the culmination of a long period of 
reflection and experimentation. One of the 
primary aims of the present undertaking 
is, therefore, to render clearer to general 
readers the meaning and origin of Sartor. 

In studying the Critical Essays, however, 
it soon became clear that Carlyle had formu- 
lated before 1831 all of the important doc- 
trines which constitute the gospel that he 
was to preach during the next thirty-five 
years. The present study will help the 
student of Carlyle to see where he found 
and how he developed many of these ideas. 

In arranging the materials for this sketch 
I am aware that perfect proportion has not 



vi PREFACE 

been observed. The analysis of the magazine 
literature of the period in Part IV., for 
example, is perhaps unduly expanded. It 
has seemed best in such cases, where the 
facts are comparatively unfamiliar, to treat 
the subject at greater length and to con- 
dense the more familiar passages. 

I wish to express my thanks to Professor 
Selden L. Whitcomb of the University of 
Kansas, and to Professor John C. Adams 
of Yale University for valuable suggestions 
and criticism. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



Chapi 


rER 


Page 




Introduction 


1 


I. 


Philosophy and Religion 


%% 


II. 


Theories of Poetry 


45 


III. 


Spiritual History 


54 


IV. 


The Times . 


82 


V. 


Sartor Resartus . 


109 




Conclusion 


122 




Bibliographical Note 


126 



THOMAS CARLYLE 

Introduction 

Much has been made of Margaret Car- 
lyle's statement that her son was a man 
"gej ill to Kve wi'." While by no means the 
most important fact about Carlyle, this 
interesting bit of biographical gossip is not 
without significance. It is one indication 
among many of his constant state of nervous 
irritability and high tension. Dante and 
Milton may be adduced in further proof that 
the spirit of prophecy and domestic felicity 
are seldom concomitants. All of these men 
were intense, somewhat narrow, and puritani- 
cal. Carlyle was not infrequently explosive, 
— ^in his wrath, in his laughter, in his habits 
of work. That this great mental and emo- 
tional energy did not entirely dissipate itself 
is due to another equally important quality, 
a remarkable unity and concentration of 
thought and purpose. Carlyle had only a 
few things to say, but he said them with 
tremendous force; he was blind on certain 
sides, but where he saw, he saw with astound- 



2 THOMAS CARLYLE 

ing clearness. In fact, that which gives to 
each of his writings its highest value is 
a certain quahty of vision, capable of dis- 
cerning in person, event, or phenomenon of 
nature that which constitutes its spiritual 
center, in discovering, to use Carljle's own 
phrase, "the reality that lies at the bottom 
of appearance." Applied to the aspects of 
physical nature this faculty leads to a con- 
viction of the "Divine Idea of the World," 
a belief that nature is only "a transitory 
garment veiling the Eternal Splendour." 
Applied to the study of human history it 
results in an absorbing interest in spiritual 
biography as contrasted with picturesque 
gossip concerning the clothes, manners and 
motions of the outward man, and in an 
attempt to determine the spiritual origin 
and meaning, the "dynamics," of historical 
events or of present society. 

This natural intensity of gaze was further 
reinforced by the gradual formulation of a 
definite philosophy, the product at once of 
German Transcendentalism and his own tem- 
perament. Both the strength and the limi- 
tation of Carlyle's writing depend largely 
on the constant application to the subject 



INTRODUCTION S 

of his thought of a profound, but limited 
and somewhat rigid philosophy of life. To 
the reader of the present day the chief value 
of his criticism lies not so much in its eval- 
uation of the objects criticised, as in the 
illustration, through their means, of this 
philosophy. We go, for instance, to the 
essay on Voltaire, less to learn something 
definite about the subject of the sketch than 
to discover how Voltairism is interpreted by 
Carlyle. Nor is the interest merely curious 
or personal. Here two great schools of 
thought are brought into conflict. It is one 
of the many little combats in a tremendous 
world battle between gods and jotuns. 

Out of this warfare against materialism 
and skepticism Carlyle was to emerge in 
later years scarred and battle-stained. But 
the time of active conflict was naturally pre- 
ceded by a period largely devoted to assimi- 
lation and preparation. As all modern men 
of wide reading must be, Carlyle was an 
eclectic, and in his early writing we con- 
stantly see him culling ideas wherever he can 
find them and appropriating them as his 
own. He was grateful to these masters of 
his thought, and, whether men of profound 



4 THOMAS CARLYLE 

genius like Goethe and Fichte, or smaller 
men like Tieck and Novalis, he was ever 
ready to give them their full due. In the 
early books and essays, therefore, we are 
able to see him in the very process of select- 
ing and arranging the component ideas of 
his philosophy. The present essay is an 
endeavor to render clearer the stages of this 
process. While not attempting an exhaust- 
ive investigation of the influences at work 
on Carlyle's mind, or the sources of his ideas 
or of his style, it is hoped that this study 
will show more clearly than has yet been 
shown what were the materials of thought 
accumulated before the publication of Sartor 
Resartus and destined to furnish the solid 
substructure of all his later work, and how 
this material was taking an increasingly 
distinct shape as he proceeded. 

Carlyle first becomes articulate for us in 
the year 1814, when at the age of eighteen 
we find him carrying on an active corre- 
spondence with a young friend, Robert 
Mitchell of Linlithgow. The Carlyle of 
these early letters discloses himself as an 
earnest and high-minded young man, with 
a strong sense of responsibility and a turn 



INTRODUCTION 5 

for giving good advice. Though the letters 
of these years furnish little evidence of 
original literary genius, it is clear that he 
has already made upon his friends the 
impression of personal power. His intense 
earnestness sometimes displays itself in a 
vaulting ambition to "make some fellows 
stand to the right and left," and at other 
times in the serious conviction that "a man's 
dignity in the great system of which he 
forms a part is exactly proportional to his 
moral and intellectual attainments." 

It is well known that much of Carlyle's 
early interest centered about the study of 
mathematics. It is perhaps not so clearly 
recognized that this interest was not that 
of the prize mathematician of the college, 
who delights in the exercise and display of 
mental acuteness, but arose from the serious 
desire to pursue truth under whatever guise 
it presented itself. This is clear both from 
the letters and from Wotton Reinfred. Car- 
lyle desires "to see these truths" and "to 
feel them." Wotton devotes himself to the 
study of mathematics until he becomes sat- 
isfied that it offers no satisfactory solution 
of the mystery of life. It was inevitable, 



6 THOMAS CARLYLE 

therefore, that Carlyle should turn from 
mathematics to philosophy. The first re- 
corded literary project is an "essay upon 
natural religion," and about the same time 
we find him reading Voltaire, "the most 
impudent, blaspheming, libidinous black- 
guard that ever lived," Dugald Stewart, 
Hume, Gibbon, and the Stoic philosophers. 

It was the reading of Mme. de Stael's Ger- 
many in September, 1817, that led Carlyle 
to the study of German literature. Six 
months later we find him taking lessons in 
German, and by 1821 he is deep in Schiller 
and Kant, Schelling and Fichte. By July 
of the latter year he has himself tasted of 
"the magic cup of literature" and resolved 
to "drink of it forever, though bitter in- 
gredients enough be mixed with the liquor." 

Of the early literary projects the most 
interesting belong to the year 1822. One 
of these is a "kind of essay on the Civil 
Wars (of) the Commonwealth of England," 
an interesting anticipation in its plan of the 
most striking features of Carlyle's historical 
method, according to which the biography of 
great men is used to interpret the truly typi- 
cal in national character, and the whole is 



INTRODUCTION 7 

used to expound a personal philosophy.^ In 
December he proposes to Miss Welsh a still 
more interesting project, the writing of a 
novel in collaboration. The hero was to be 
a disappointed young man of genius in cir- 
cumstances resembling Carlyle's own. "Sick 
of struggling along the sordid bustle of 
existence, where he could glean so little 
enjoyment but found so much acute suffer- 
ing," he was to wander discontentedly over 
the hill country, musing and meditating and 
occasionally delivering his opinions "upon 
many points of science, literature and 
morals." As his mental malady increased 
he was to speak forth his sufferings "with a 
tongue of fire — sharp, sarcastic, apparently 
unfeeling, yet all the while betokening to the 
quick-sighted a mind of lofty thoughts and 
generous affections smarting under the tor- 
ments of its own over-nobleness, and ready 
to break in pieces by the force of its own 
energies." This is the moment of entrance 
for the heroine, that is, for Miss Welsh, 
who rescues him from his state of despond- 

a In 1898 Alexander Carlyle edited a series of Historical 
Sketches, written by Carlyle about 1842 and 1843, a partial 
fulfillment of the plan outlined in 1822. 



8 THOMAS CARLYLE 

ency. "The earth again grows green 
beneath his feet, his soul recovers all its 
fiery energies, he is prepared to front death 
and danger, to wrestle with devils and men, 
that he may gain your favor. For a while 
you laugh at him, but at length take pity 
on the poor fellow, and grow as serious as 
he is. Then, oh then! what a more than 
elysian prospect ! But alas ! Fate, etc., 
obstacles, etc., etc. You are both broken- 
hearted, and die ; and the whole closes with 
a mortcloth, and Mr. Trotter and a com- 
pany of undertakers." 

Although Carlyle soon abandoned this 
project ("your novel-love has become a per- 
fect drug"), it was destined to bud a few 
years later, frost-nipped to be sure, in 
Wotton Remfred, and to come to fruition at 
last in the biographical portion of Sartor 
Resartus. Of the other writings before 1826 
all partake more or less of the nature of 
hackwork. Besides the encyclopedia articles 
written for Dr. Brewster, these are the Life 
of Schiller, written in 1823 and 1824, the 
translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, 
undertaken about the same time, and the 
translations for the volume of German 



INTRODUCTION 9 

Romance, apparently begun in November, 
1825, and finished in June, 1826. On Octo- 
ber 17, Carlyle and Miss Welsh were married 
in the bride's home in Templand. His period 
of hackwork and his unmarried life ended 
together. 

The seven years from 1819 to 1826 while 
Carlyle had been struggling to find a place 
for himself in the field of letters had been 
in other ways perhaps the most crucial of 
his life. Dyspepsia and doubt had joined 
forces to bring him torment, and the first 
three years of this period are those which he 
has described as "the three most miserable 
years of my life." The famous conversion 
or "new birth" had taken place in June, 
1821, but the victory was not completed 
until 1826, when "the final chaining down, 
trampling home 'for good,' home into their 
caves for ever of all my spiritual dragons" 
was at last accomplished. Even more dis- 
tressing than his religious doubts was the 
lack of certainty as to his own usefulness. 
"The thought that one's best days are hurry- 
ing darkly and uselessly away" seems to 
have been the most grievous of all his 
burdens. 



10 THOMAS CARLYLE 

In the meanwhile he is not entirely 
absorbed in the internal struggle. In 1819 
for the first time we find him taking a lively 
interest in social problems. The letters 
from this time on contain little pictures of 
the pathos and tragedy in the lives of the 
poor and oppressed as they revealed them- 
selves to this thoughtful young Scotchman 
of a century ago, with his hungry heart, 
his ready sympathy and no less ready con- 
tempt, and his Faustian thirst for a deeper 
knowledge of the meaning of life. We see 
him at the time of the Radical rising in 
Glasgow overtaking an old peasant and 
eagerly discussing with him the rights of 
the people and the poverty and misery of 
the working classes ; or visiting the iron and 
coal works at Birmingham and expressing 
his pity for grimy and naked humanity 
"plashing about among dripping caverns, 
or scrambling amid heaps of broken mineral ; 
and thirsting unquenchably for beer"; or 
turning into the Morgue at Paris to see the 
naked body of "an old gray-headed artisan 
whom misery had driven to drown himself in 
the river." The young observer notes the 
"grim fixed look of despair," the "lean, 



INTRODUCTION 11 

horny hands with their long ragged nails," 
and "the patched and soiled apparel with 
apron and sabots hanging at his head," and, 
already keenly alive to the value of contrast, 
throws the whole against the background of 
noisy life streaming along the Pont Neiif, 
A letter from London two months later pre- 
sents a similarly striking picture of that 
"enormous Babel," with its "coaches and 
wains and sheep and oxen and wild people 
rushing on with bellowings and shrieks and 
thundering din, as if the earth in general 
were gone distracted." There is in all this 
perhaps too preponderant an interest in the 
strikingly spectacular, too keen a desire to 
throw the picture of the gray-headed artisan 
into sharp contrast with the quacking, sharp- 
ing, racketing multitude, too little of that 
yearning human compassion which makes 
possible a Bridge of Sighs or a Little Dorrit. 
There is, however, a note of noble indignation 
against wrong and oppression, premonitory 
of Chartism and of Past and Present. 

That Carlyle's sense of consecration to a 
high purpose was growing in him during 
this period is evident from the tone of many 
letters. Carlyle has frequently been accused 



12 THOMAS CARLYLE 

of egoism, and he cannot, I think, be wholly 
cleared of this charge. In spite of his con- 
viction of the necessity of renunciation he 
never really learned the lesson of self- 
effacement. Like Ruskin, he was filled with 
wrath and disappointment at England for 
paying so little heed to his most vehement 
warnings. A touch of spiritual pride that 
occasionally approaches Pharisaism now and 
then offends us. Yet, on the whole, he was, 
I believe, a man of true humility and true 
sympathy; and to compare him, as a writer 
has recently done, to the Japanese Thunder- 
god who leers and lashes at humanity with 
no real compassion for it in his heart, is 
grossly unjust. Carlyle began with aggres- 
sive egoism, but he soon realized that life 
made nobler demands upon him than those 
of personal ambition. In February, 1825, 
he writes to Alexander Carlyle: "Literary 
fame is a thing which I covet little; but I 
desire to be working honestly in my day and 
generation in this business, which has now 
become my trade." "Do not imagine," he 
writes to Miss Welsh in January, 1823, 
"that I make no account of a glorious name : 
I think it is the best of external rewards. 



INTRODUCTION 13 

but never to be set in competition with those 
that lie within." 

Finally, the letters written toward the 
close of this period reveal a tremendously 
increased power of expression. The vision 
is clearer, the penetration deeper, the lan- 
guage more poetical. The man has seen 
more widely, felt more deeply, lived more 
earnestly. Though he has not yet gained 
the power of expressing his whole mind in 
any completed work of art, many letters 
show that in single passages he has learned 
how to bring all his faculties, pictorial and 
reflective, to bear. Along with this goes a 
deepening of the sense of mystery. Even 
in the midst of hackwork he has begun to 
voyage strange seas of thought alone, to see 
in an ancient Scotch city the beauty of "a 
city of fairy-land," in St. Paul's Cathedral 
the solemnity of "Tadmor in the wilderness," 
and to find that a hidden mystery lies behind 
every simplest fact of life and of death, 
"could man outlook that mark." 

Carlyle began his married life at 21 Com- 
ley Bank, Edinburgh, where he lived from 
October, 1826, until May, 1828. From the 
latter year until after the publication of 



14 THOMAS CARLYLE 

Sartor Resartus in 1834 his home was the 
lonely farmhouse of Craigenputtock. The 
period of apprenticeship, however, may be 
said to have been completed by the end of 
1881. The writings of these years include 
nineteen of the Critical and Miscellaneous 
Essays, the unfinished novel of Wot ton 
Reinfred, and Sartor Resartus. The more 
important essays are the two on Richter, 
The State of German Literature, Burns, 
Goethe, Voltaire, Novalis, Signs of the 
Times, History, Schiller, and Characteris- 
tics.^ None of these can properly be termed 
hackwork. They are written with spirit and 
originality and constitute an important part 
of Carlyle's literary output. In Sartor he 
found for himself a true medium of expres- 
sion, and with the completion of this book 
by the middle of 1831, and the publication 
of Characteristics in the same year, the 
period of literary apprenticeship has come 
to a close. 

The novel of Wotton Reinfred was begun 
about the end of January, 1827.^ Its title 

a See Bibliographical Note. 

b On February 3 Carlyle says, "Last week, too, I fairly 
began .... a book." 



INTRODUCTION 15 

is first mentioned in March of the same year. 
On June 4 we hear that "poor Wotton has 
prospered but indifferently .... though 
daily on the anvil," and the last passing 
mention of it is on February 1, 18S8, at 
which time it had apparently not yet been 
abandoned. Mr. Norton quotes from an 
unpublished manuscript of Carlyle's written 
in 1869, to the effect that "the work proved 
to be a dreary zerOy and went wholly to the 
fire." The seven completed chapters were, 
however, left among Carlyle's papers at his 
death, and were published by D. Applet on & 
Company in 1892. The story of the publi- 
cation of Sartor has been told more than 
once and need not be repeated here. Begun 
about September, 1830, it was finished, 
revised and expanded by July, 1831, when 
Carlyle set off for London to find a publisher. 
After its rejection it was laid aside without 
change in the text until November, 1833, 
when it began to appear in Fraser^s Maga- 
zine. 

In the meanwhile the published reviews 
were attracting considerable attention. Their 
author was beginning to be talked about and 
even to gather a little band of disciples. He 



16 THOMAS CARLYLE 

writes from Edinburgh in 1827 that the 
people seem to think him "a genius perhaps, 
but of what sort Heaven only knows." He 
is regarded rather to his own satisfaction as 
a mystic. A parcel from the Societe St.- 
Simonienne in Paris after the publication of 
Signs of the Times, a conversation with a 
certain Mrs. Austin, whom he describes as 
"the most enthusiastic of German Mystics," 
and the visit of "a young man. Coke, from 
Norwich," the bearer of a letter from a little 
band of "Disciplekins," are small encourage- 
ments. Three months later Mill introduces 
him to a "fresh lot of youths" who seek his 
acquaintance. 

All this impresses more and more upon 
him the readiness and necessity for adminis- 
tering some sort of "medicinal assafcetida" 
to the "pudding-stomach of England." 
Much jangling concerning that "everlasting 
'Catholic question' " and the Reform Bill 
reaches his ears even at Craigenputtock, but 
sounds somewhat vain there. To one whose 
"Seed-field is Time" the proper relation 
toward all this seems "that chiefly of Specta- 
tor."^ Nevertheless, he is not indifFerent to 

a Letter to Dr. Carlyle, June 6, 1831. 



INTRODUCTION 17 

the actual state of English society in his own 
day. His Journal for February, 1829, 
records his desire above all things to know 
England and "the essence of the social life" 
there, and the jottings of this and the fol- 
lowing year contain many reflections on 
social questions.* He is, in fact, interested 
in all that pertains to the life of his time, 
but it is rather the inner than the outer man 
with whom he is concerned. The "Mechan- 
ism" of Whigs, and Lord Advocates, and 
"unspeakably gabbling Parliamenteers and 
Pulpiteers" offends him: "one spark of 
Dynamism, of Inspiration, were it in the 
poorest soul, is stronger than they all" 
( Craigenputtock, March 4, 1831). He is 
resolved that he at least shall sit no longer 
"mute as milestone, while Quacks of every 
description are quacking as with lungs of 
brass," even though "poor Teufelsdreck" 
stands unsupported in such resistance. 
After the failure to get Sartor printed, he 
contemplates for a while the possibility of 
lecturing to "this benighted multitude," 

a The extracts of the journal of 1829-1830, which form 
Chapter 4 of Froude's second volume, contain many passages 
afterwards incorporated with changes in Sartor Resartus. 



18 THOMAS CARLYLE 

whose "gross groping ignorance" is becom- 
ing more and more evident to him. 

Carlyle's spiritual condition at the begin- 
ning of this period and his fitness to deliver 
a message of affirmation are indicated in a 
letter to Goethe (August 20, 1827) : 

"As it is, your works have been a mirror 
to me; unasked and unhoped for, your 
wisdom has counselled me; and so peace and 
health of soul have visited me from afar. 
For I was once an Unbeliever, not in Reli- 
gion only, but in all the Mercy and Beauty 
of which it is the symbol; storm-tossed in 
my own imaginations ; a man divided from 
men ; exasperated, wretched, driven almost 
to despair ; so that Faust's wild curse seemed 
the only fit greeting for human life; and his 
passionate Fluch vor alien der Geduld! was 
spoken from my very inmost heart. But 
now, thank Heaven, all this is altered; with- 
out change of external circumstances, solely 
by the new hght which rose upon me, I 
attained to new thoughts, and a composure 
which I should have once considered as 
impossible. And now, under happier omens, 
though the bodily health which I lost in 
these struggles has never been and may 



INTRODUCTION 19 

never be restored to me, I look forward with 
cheerfulness to a life spent in Literature, 
with such fortune and such strength as may 
be granted me ; hoping little and fearing 
little from the world; having learned that 
what I once called Happiness is not only not 
to be attained on Earth, but not even to be 
desired." 

The conviction that "the root of bitter- 
ness in the bottom of our cup" cannot be 
removed had slowly forced itself upon him 
and had now become an integral part of his 
philosophy. "Happy he who learns to drink 
it without wincing!" he says in a letter to 
Alexander Carlyle, written in January, 1827. 
"Happier and wiser who can see that in this 
very bitterness there is a medicine for his 
Soul." The renunciation of happiness 
demands either resignation or revolt and 
bitterness of spirit. Carlyle chose the 
former. "Humility is no mean feeling, but 
the highest, and only one; the denial of Self 
it is, and therein is the beginning of all that 
is truly generous and noble" (January, 
1831) . "He who has seen into the high mean- 
ing of 'entsagen,' " he writes to Goethe, 
"cherishes even here a still Faith in quite 



20 THOMAS CARLYLE 

another Future than the vulgar devotee 
believes, or the vulgar sceptic denies." 

To believe in the goodness of hfe, yet to 
disbelieve in the possibility of earthly happi- 
ness, is in itself a high act of faith. With 
Carlyle it was based upon the belief that 
"Life is but a Shadow and a Show," and that 
"the Substance and the Truth lies beyond 
it." More and more the actual world about 
him was coming to seem to him spectral and 
unreal. "Man walks on the very brink of 
unfathomable abysses always," he writes to 
his brother John, and to his mother: "This 
mad Existence .... I look upon rather as 
a heavy Dream, wherefrom, when the night 
is passed, we shall awaken to a fair Morn- 
ing." The disregard of fame and worldly 
ambition, and "the search and declaration" 
of the invisible truth, the honest striving 
"after the Idea," is from this time on to 
become his steadfast purpose. Diligence, 
"like the stars unhasting, unresting,"* the 
pursuit of Truth, recognized as priceless, and 
the avoidance of Dilettanteism, the endeavor 
to make of oneself a man, and not only 
"another money-gaining and money-spend- 

a Goethe's "ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast." 



INTRODUCTION 21 

ing machine," these are the counsels that he 
is giving to others and striving himself to 
follow.* "Not the quantity of Pleasure we 
have had, but the quantity of Victory we 
have gained, of Labor we have overcome: 
that is the happiness of Life." 

a See the letter to Mr. Henry Inglis, March 31, 1829. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 

To make anything like a complete expo- 
sition of Carljle's philosophy would lead us 
far beyond the bounds of the present under- 
taking. Besides, it has been done, or at 
least been attempted with greater or less 
success, not once but several times.* It is 
our purpose here merely to sketch rapidly 
the successive appearances of his more impor- 
tant philosophical tenets. 

Carlyle's first mention of Kant in the 
letters is in 1820. He began reading the 
transcendental philosophers soon after. In 
1825, at the time of the appearance of the 
Schiller, he was looking to them with hope, 
though without any extravagant expecta- 
tions, for that solution of the mystery of 
life for which his whole soul ardently longed. 
"The Philosophy of Kant is probably com- 
bined with errors to its very core; but per- 
haps also, this ponderous, unmanageable 

a See, for instance, The Philosophy of Carlyle, by Edwin 
D, Mead, Boston, 1881. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 23 

dross may bear in it the everlasting gold of 
truth." By this time he had already parted 
with a belief in orthodox Christianity, he had 
decided against the possibility of miraculous 
interference with the laws of nature, but 
his reverent and enthusiastic temperament 
demanded some expression in religious belief. 
The grounds for such faith he had been 
unable to find in the English and Scotch 
philosophers. He had toiled conscientiously 
over Dugald Stewart, and had read eagerly 
the works of Locke and Hume. But the 
lack of clear penetration in the one, and the 
materialism and skepticism of the other two 
offended him. The Germans, on the other 
hand, seemed to hold the key to the situation, 
at any rate they seemed to approach the 
problem from the right direction. That all 
phenomena, when traced far enough, end in 
mystery, is indisputable. That this myste- 
rious life is spiritual rather than mechanical 
in its origin and its essence, is at least 
impossible to disprove. That not merely 
occasional, but that all phenomena, are 
accordingly to be looked upon as miraculous 
in the sense that they are mysterious, inex- 
plicable, and worthy of reverence, is a 



24 THOMAS CARLYLE 

justifiable and even lofty doctrine. These 
are the chief tenets which Carlyle found 
expressed for him in German Transcenden- 
talism, and which accordingly he appro- 
priated as his own. 

That none of these fundamental beliefs or 
habits of mind is new, that they are all to be 
found, for instance, in the book of Job, does 
not make Carlyle's debt to the Germans the 
less. What Transcendentalism did for him 
was to persuade him that these beliefs are 
still reasonable to a modern man, that they 
are not inconsistent with the latest discov- 
eries of science, and that they may be 
deduced by the most strict and logical 
methods known to the best equipped modem 
mind. In other words, Kant translated the 
language of the Bible and of Plato into the 
modern tongue. 

In the first essay on Richter this phil- 
osophy, as modified by the individual mind 
of the novelist, is just mentioned. Richter's 
philosophy is deemed noteworthy in that it 
is not mechanical or skeptical, that in spite 
of disregard of dogma and apparent irrever- 
ence it is at bottom profoundly reverent and 
religious ; that it clings fast to faith in man's 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 25 

immortality and native grandeur, and that 
this faith is joined with that love of truth 
which leads through doubt and denial before 
it reaches affirmation. This is the only sort 
of faith possible to the noble modern mind. 

Carlyle's first attempt to present in any 
adequate way the more important conclu- 
sions of the transcendentalists occurs in the 
essay on The State of German Literature. 
The Germans have been accused of mysti- 
cism. It is in answer to this charge that 
Carlyle examines the philosophy which has 
so profoundly influenced both their formal 
thought and their imaginative literature. 
The charge of mysticism arises, he believes, 
either from the inability of the reader to 
follow abstract discussion which cannot be 
set forth through the use of ordinary sym- 
bols, or from the inability of the writer, 
"seized by some touch of divine Truth," to 
convey his meaning through the rude sym- 
bols at his command. Of mysticism in the 
latter sense Kant with his strong, clear 
quality of vision cannot justly be accused. 

Carlyle does not pretend to have mastered 
the philosophy which he here partially 
expounds. He still professes to be only an 



26 THOMAS CARLYLE 

inquirer on the outskirts of the matter, but 
zealous to prove to Englishmen that there is 
matter worthy of investigation. It can 
hardly be said that he ever became much 
more than this. He seized upon those doc- 
trines which naturally appealed to his own 
type of mind and gave them prominence. 

Of these he selects in this place two of 
primary importance. They are, first^: that 
Primitive Truth, the assumption upon which 
philosophy must build, is not to be found in 
the experience of sense, but through the 
faculty of intuition, "in the deepest and 
purest nature of Man." God, Virtue, the 
Soul, are not to be proved but to be assumed, 
for no other truth is so primitive or so cer- 
tain. "To open the inward eye to the sight 
of this Primitively True," which, when 
rightly discerned, will need no further proof, 
is then the true task of philosophy. 

The second doctrine asserts the existence 
of a special faculty by which this Primitive 
Truth may be discerned. The distinction 
between the Understanding and the Reason 
{V erst and and Vernunft) Carlyle calls "the 
grand characteristic of Kant's philosophy." 
Both Understanding and Reason are organs, 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 27 

or modes of operation, by which the mind 
discovers truth. Reason, however, deals 
with Truth itself. Understanding only with 
relations ; Understanding moves in the do- 
main of logic and argument; Reason in the 
higher realm of Poetry and Virtue. Man's 
spiritual welfare depends in large measure 
upon the subordination of the Understanding 
to the Reason. Much of the merit of this 
philosophy lies in its moral loftiness and its 
religious depth. The German literature, 
inspired by it consciously or unconsciously, 
"breathes a spirit of devoutness and eleva- 
tion," and its greatest thinkers, men like 
Fichte, possess a rare moral grandeur. The 
description of this "cold, colossal, adaman- 
tine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a 
Cato Major among degenerate men," is well 
known. 

The distinction between the Understand- 
ing and the Reason affords Carlyle through- 
out the essays a criterion for judging emi- 
nent men. As in the realm of poetry, so in 
that of philosophy Goethe and Voltaire are 
contrasted types. With Voltaire Under- 
standing is supreme. He sees no mystery 
or majesty in heaven or earth; "his sub- 



28 THOMAS CARLYLE 

limest Apocalypse of Nature lies in the 
microscope and telescope ; the Earth is a 
place for producing corn ; the Starry Heav- 
ens are admirable as a nautical timekeeper."* 
This constitutes the ground of his inferiority 
to Goethe, who dwells in the realm of Reason. 
The same superiority in less degree belongs 
to other Germans, to Schiller, to Richter, 
and to Novalis. 

In the essay on the last named writer 
Carlyle once more undertakes to expound to 
some extent the transcendental philosophy. 
We have again the distinction between the 
absolute existence of spirit and the relative 
existence of matter. "To a Transcenden- 
talist matter has an existence, but only as a 
Phenomenon; were we not there neither 
would it be there; it is a mere Relation, or 
rather the result of a Relation between our 
living Souls and the great First Cause; and 
depends for its apparent qualities on our 
bodily and mental organs; having itself no 
intrinsic qualities; being, in the common 
sense of that word, Nothing." 

Carlyle proceeds next to explain the Kan- 
tian doctrine of subjectivity of Space and 

a Voltaire. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 29 

Time, and then repeats the distinction made 
in the earher essay between the Understand- 
ing and the Reason. In his discussion of 
these ideas and of the application made of 
them by Novahs we come upon many of the 
phrases familiar to the readers of Sartor. 
The material Creation is "an Appearance, a 
typical shadow in which the Deity manifests 
himself to Man" ; it is "a show" ; "Sound 
and Smoke overclouding 'the Splendour of 
Heaven' " ; it is "the veil and mysterious 
Garment of the Unseen" ; the earth and its 
glories are a "vapour and a Dream." 

This idealism may be universally applied. 
In accordance with its mode of thought the 
physical universe is to be looked upon as a 
garment of Deity; the Visible Church is 
only the outward mechanism of the Invisible 
Church; society is governed by a Social 
Idea: 

"Every Society, every Polity, has a spir- 
itual principle; is the embodiment, tentative 
and more or less complete, of an Idea; all 
its tendencies of endeavor, specialties of 
custom, its laws, politics and whole pro- 
cedure (as the glance of some Montesquieu, 
across innumerable superficial entangle- 



30 THOMAS CARLYLE 

ments, can partly decipher), are prescribed 
by an Idea, and flow naturally from it, as 
movements from the living source of motion. 
This Idea, be it of devotion to a man or 
class of men, to a creed, to an institution, or 
even, as in more ancient times, to a piece of 
land, is ever a true Loyalty; has in it some- 
thing of a religious, paramount, quite infi- 
nite character; it is properly the Soul of 
the State, its Life, mysterious as other forms 
of Life, and like these working secretly, and 
in a depth beyond that of consciousness."^ 

In the novel of Wotton Reinfred the 
mystic philosopher Dalbrook, whom Leslie 
Stephen identifies with Coleridge, is the 
champion of the transcendental philosophy. 
Incapable of action and without unity in 
himself, he is an ardent seeker of truth and 
a worshipper of the invisible. A single pas- 
sage on Truth, spoken by Dalbrook, may be 
quoted for the sake of its characteristic 
quality and its intrinsic beauty: 

" 'It is expressed oftener than it is listened 
to or comprehended,' said the other in reply ; 
'for our ears are heavy, and the divine 
harmony of the spheres is drowned in the 

a Characteristics. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 31 

gross, harsh dissonance of earthly things. 
Expressed? In the expiring smile of mar- 
tyrs ; in the actions of a Howard and a Cato ; 
in the still existence of all good men. Echoes 
of it come to us from the song of the poet ; 
the sky with its azure and its rainbow and 
its beautiful vicissitudes of morn and even 
shows it forth; the earth also with her floods 
and everlasting Alps, the ocean with its tem- 
pests and its calms. It is an open secret, 
but we have no clear vision for it: woe to us 
if we have no vision at all !' " 

It is a somewhat curious fact that Car- 
lyle's first important discussion of an ethical 
problem occurs in the little-read essay on 
The Life and Writings of Werner. The 
doctrines are not yet set forth boldly as Car- 
lyle's own, but presented merely as the creed 
of a mystical German dramatist. Many 
pages of confused and cloudy character had 
to be waded through before this creed could 
be ascertained. When, however, we do reach 
the conclusion we find that it agrees with 
the decision which Carlyle himself was slowly 
forming during these years. Under the 
mythuses of Phosphoros and Baff^ometus, in 
the latter of which we recognize the "Bapho- 



32 THOMAS CARLYLE 

metic Fire-Baptism" of Sartor, Carlyle finds 
figured his own doctrine of resignation. 

"His [Werner's] fundamental principle of 
morals we have seen in part already: it does 
not exclusively or primarily belong to him- 
self; being little more than that high tenet 
of entire Self-forgetfulness, that 'merging 
of the Me in the Idea'; a principle which 
reigns both in Stoical and Christian ethics, 
and is at this day common, in theory, among 
all German philosophers, especially of the 
Transcendental class. Werner has adopted 
this principle with his whole heart and his 
whole soul, as the indispensable condition of 
all Virtue He will not have Happi- 
ness, under any form, to be the real or chief 
end of man: this is but love of enjoyment, 
disguise it as we like ; and a more complex 
and sometimes more respectable species of 
hunger, he would say; to be admitted as an 
indestructible element in human nature, but 
nowise to be recognized as the highest ; on 
the contrary, to be resisted and incessantly 
warred with, till it become obedient to love 
of God, which is only, in the truest sense, 
love of Goodness, and the germ of which lies 
deep in the inmost nature of man ; of author- 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 33 

ity superior to all sensitive impulses ; form- 
ing, in fact, the grand law of his being, as 
subjection to it forms the first and last con- 
dition of spiritual health. He thinks that 
to propose a reward for virtue is to render 
virtue impossible. He warmly seconds 
Schleiermacher in declaring that even the 
hope of Immortality is a consideration unfit 
to be introduced into religion, and tending 
only to pervert it, and impair its sacred- 
ness." 

It will be recognized that here we have all 
the essential elements of Carlyle's ethics as 
set forth in the second book of Sartor 
Resartus. 

The same ethical idea runs through the 
great essay on Burns. But here it is no 
longer hesitatingly uttered as the creed of 
another, but set forth in words of burning 
conviction. 

"We become men, not after we have been 
dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of 
false pleasure ; but after we have ascertained, 
in any way, what impassable barriers hem us 
in through this life; how mad it is to hope 
for contentment to our infinite soul from 
the gifts \)f this extremely finite world ; that 



34 THOMAS CARLYLE 

a man must be sufficient for himself; and 
that for suffering and enduring there is no 
remedy but striving and doing. Manhood 
begins when we have in any way made truce 
with Necessity; begins even when we have 
surrendered to Necessity, as the most part 
only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully 
only when we have reconciled ourselves to 
Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed 
over it, and felt that in Necessity we are 
free." 

Carlyle finds Burns' inferiority to men 
like Locke and Milton and Cervantes in his 
inability to attain to their condition of self- 
forgetfulness. These men were not "self- 
seekers and self-worshippers," they had 
another object than personal enjoyment; 
they counted it "blessedness to spend and be 
spent" in the service of that "Invisible Good- 
ness, which alone is man's reasonable ser- 
vice." 

Still more clearly anticipatory of the 
familiar passages in Sartor is the discussion 
of the "Happiness-question" in the essay 
on Schiller. Carlyle's argument is that, 
although we recognize the fact that the gross 
are happier than the refined, we would still 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 35 

be unwilling to change places with them. 
His position in regard to the whole matter 
is nowhere stated more clearly than in this 
essay. 

"If Happiness mean Welfare, there is no 
doubt but all men should and must pursue 
their Welfare, that is to say, pursue what is 
worthy of their pursuit. But if, on the 
other hand. Happiness mean, as for most 
men it does, 'agreeable sensations,' Enjoy- 
ment refined or not, then must we observe 
that there is a doubt; or rather that there 
is a certainty the other way. Strictly con- 
sidered, this truth, that man has in him 
something higher than a Love of Pleasure, 
take Pleasure in what sense you will, has 
been the text of all true Teachers and 
Preachers since the beginning of the world; 
and in one or another dialect, we may hope, 
will continue to be preached and taught till 
the world end." 

Wotton Reinfred opens characteristically 
with a discussion of the question of happi- 
ness, Wotton contending that happiness "if 
it be the aim was never meant to be the end 
of our being." The subject is resumed in a 
later chapter. Various ideas familiar to the 



36 THOMAS CARLYLE 

reader of Carlyle are brought forward, that 
happiness is dependent upon stupidity and 
"an excellent nervous system" ; that unhap- 
piness would be less if we ceased to demand 
that to which we have no proper claim ; that 
"our highest, our only real blessedness lies 
in this very warfare with evil" ; that not 
happiness, but the disinterested pursuit of 
virtue is man's highest wish. This leads 
naturally to the question of self-interest as 
a motive for conduct and its rejection 
together with all other motives "in that 
sense of the word motive." The germ of the 
theory of unconsciousness later elaborated in 
the essay called Characteristics is to be found 
in a sentence in the same paragraph: "The 
virtue we are conscious of is no right virtue." 
That the best answer to all such problems 
is to be found in the right performance of 
duty and that "the end of man is an action, 
not a thought," is a conclusion reached early 
in the book. "It is a poor philosophy which 
can be taught in words : we talk and talk ; 
and talking without acting, though Socrates 
were the speaker, does not help our case but 
aggravate it. Thou must act, thou must 
work, thou must do! Collect thyself, com- 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 37 

pose thyself, find what is wanting that so 
tortures thee; do but attempt with all thy 
strength to attain it and thou art saved." 

Throughout the period of the early essays 
we may say, I think, with confidence, that 
this principle of Self- Annihilation, or Resig- 
nation, involving the renunciation of happi- 
ness on the one hand and devotion to some 
higher ideal on the other, constitutes Car- 
lyle's most important ethical teaching. In 
addition to this he lays chief emphasis upon 
reverence and sincerity as leading virtues. 

Reverence for that which is higher and 
nobler than ourselves is the beginning of 
wisdom. Carlyle's chief debt to Goethe was 
the lesson that reverence was still possible 
for all men. The chief fault in Voltaire's 
constitution was the lack of the feeling of 
reverence. All manifestations of the spirit, 
all evidences of the invisible Goodness, should 
inspire in us this feeling. Especially is this 
true of the highest manifestation of all, the 
life of a spiritually gifted man. Such men 
are "Illuminated Characters" in the Book 
of Life, "Hieroglyphs of a true Sacred 
Writing," "mystic windows through which 
we glance deeper into the hidden ways of 



38 THOMAS CARLYLE 

Nature."* The doctrine of Hero-Worship is 
not prominent in the early essays, does not 
become so until the criticism of Croker's 
Edition of Boswell's Johnson in 1832, but it 
finds occasional expression. Burns' visit to 
Edinburgh is an illustration of it. Vol- 
taire's final visit to Paris is highly signifi- 
cant of the reverence paid to wisdom or the 
show of it. "Only to spiritual worth can 
the spirit do reverence ; only in a soul deeper 
and better than ours can we see any heavenly 
mystery, and in humbling ourselves feel our- 
selves exalted We rejoice to see and 

know that such a principle exists perennially 
in man's inmost bosom ; that there is no heart 
so sunk and stupefied, none so withered and 
pampered, but the felt presence of .a nobler 
heart will inspire it and lead it captive." 

Sincerity, as Carlyle later elaborated the 
idea, came to mean not only honesty of pur- 
pose, but vision and sympathy; a power to 
see through appearance into reality, a dwell- 
ing in the Truth of things, a living in the 
Divine Idea. The inculcation of this virtue, 
frequently reiterated in Carlyle's later work, 

a These familiar phrases first occur in the article on Peter 
Nimmo in Eraser's Magazine, February, 1831. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 39 

is less prominent in the early period. In the 
essay on Burns, however, he finds it, "the 
root of most other virtues, literary as well 
as moral." Burns' chief excellence is "his 
Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth." 
"Let a man but speak forth with genuine 
earnestness the thought, the emotion, the 
actual condition of his own heart ; and other 
men, so strangely are we all knit together by 
the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed 
to him." 

Carlyle's religion, as visible to us in the 
early essays, is neither dogmatic and eccle- 
siastical, nor vaguely benevolent and human- 
itarian. It is not allied with theology on 
the one hand or with socialism on the other. 
It has been called pantheistic, but pantheism 
is a vague term and may mean anything or 
nothing. Religion for Carlyle consisted in 
a clear perception of, and a deep reverence 
for, what he calls the Divine Idea of the 
World. The perception everywhere of a 
divine power and presence, manifest in the 
moving of the stars and in the smallest blade 
of grass, through which as through a 
window man may look into the infinite, the 
recognition of the miraculous in what men 



40 THOMAS CARLYLE 

are pleased to call the common, and of the 
supernatural in the natural, these are its 
essential modes. The truly religious tem- 
perament is described in Tieck's comment on 
Novalis, for whom "it had become the most 
natural disposition to regard the commonest 
and nearest as a wonder, and the strange, 
the supernatural as something common; 
man's every-day life itself lay round him like 
a wondrous fable, and those regions which 
the most dream of or doubt of as of a thing 
distant, incomprehensible, were for him a 
beloved home." Such perception and recog- 
nition of the divine about us is possible only 
to profound spirits, gifted with the powers 
of love, reverence and insight. It will be 
seen in the following section that these are 
the very faculties which Carlyle has de- 
manded also of the true poet. It may be 
inferred, therefore, that the true poet and 
the truly religious man are one and the 
same, except perhaps in faculty of expres- 
sion. This is indeed Carlyle's belief. Poetry 
"is but another form of Wisdom, of Reli- 
gion ; is itself Wisdom and Religion."* 

Religion, then, is not to be identified with 

a Burns. 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 41 

its forms. These are, as he quotes approv- 
ingly from Richter, but "the Ethnic Fore- 
court of the Invisible Temple" which con- 
stitutes the true church. In the essay on 
Werner the idea is further elaborated: 

"It is a common theory among the Ger- 
mans that every Creed, every Form of wor- 
ship, is a form merely; the mortal and ever- 
changing hodi/, in which the immortal and 
unchanging spirit of Religion is, with more 
or less completeness, expressed to the mate- 
rial eye, and made manifest and influential 
among the doings of men." The figure of 
the Phoenix as "shadowing forth the history 
of his own Faith," used by Carlyle in Sartor 
as the emblem of the history of all religion, 
is borrowed from Werner. 

In the figure of the Phoenix two ideas are 
implicit: first, the distinction in religion 
between the spirit or reality and the forms 
or phenomena; and second, the evolutionary 
idea, the unchanging spirit of religion being 
thought of as passing through continuous 
metamorphosis of perishable forms. To this 
idea Carlyle applies the Kantian distinction 
between the Understanding and the Reason, 
the forms of religion being in the province 



42 THOMAS CARLYLE 

of the former and its spirit in that of the 
latter. Men, therefore, who allow their 
Understanding to master their Reason can- 
not by any possibility be religious men, since 
they are sure to place the forms or the prac- 
tical benefits of religion above its mysterious 
spirit. This is the trouble with the Ben- 
thams and the Paleys as well as the Vol- 
taires. Voltaire, indeed, spent his whole 
strength in battling, if not quite ineffect- 
ually, at any rate with an entire misunder- 
standing of the situation. "That the Chris- 
tian Religion could have any deeper founda- 
tion than Books, could possibly be written 
in the purest nature of man, in mysterious, 
ineffaceable characters, to which Books, and 
all Revelations, and authentic traditions, 
were but a subsidiary matter, were but as 
the light by which that divine writing was 
to be read; — nothing of this seems to have, 
even in the faintest manner, occurred to 
him." 

It follows from what has already been 
said that the Christian Religion is to be 
thought of as simply one form, though 
immeasurably the highest, of the universal 
spirit of religion. To compare it, however, 



PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION 4S 

as superior, inferior or equal to, any other 
form is to hit beside the mark, since it differs 
from such forms in its entire nature, "as a 
perfect Ideal Poem does from a correct com- 
putation in Arithmetic." To exactly define 
its nature is also impossible. Something of 
its divine character may, however, be sug- 
gested in such phrases as Humility, or the 
"Sanctuary of Sorrow," or may be symbol- 
ized by some such parable as that of the 
Three Reverences in Wilhelm Meister, to 
which Carlyle makes reference in the essay 
on Goethe, in Sartor, and in the Edinburgh 
Address of 1866. 

"But now we have to speak of the Third 
Religion, grounded on Reverence for what 
is Under us: this we name the Christian; as 
in the Christian Religion such a temper is 
the most distinctly manifested: it is a last 
step to which mankind was fitted and des- 
tined to attain. But what a task was it, not 
only to be patient with the Earth, and let 
it lie beneath us, we appealing to a higher 
birthplace; but also to recognize humility 
and poverty, mockery and despite, disgrace 
and wretchedness, suffering and death, to 
recognize these things as divine; nay, even 



44 THOMAS CARLYLE 

on sin and crime to look not as hindrances, 
but to honor and love them as furtherances, 
of what is holy."* 

The essence of the Christian Religion 
resides then in its spirit of humility, rever- 
ence and self-denial. "Enlightened self- 
interest," which is advanced by the French 
Philosophes and the English Utilitarians as 
a sufficient guide for conduct will prove a 
"dim homlantern" hardly able to keep man- 
kind from stumbling into quagmires. As 
self-denial is the primary virtue, so we may 
say, with apologies to Matthew Arnold, that 
self-denial, "touched with emotion," is, in 
Carlyle's opinion, the heart of the Christian 
Religion. 

a Quoted from Meister's Travels in the esSay on Goethe. 



II 

THEORIES OF POETRY 

"Divine philosophy" wrought into noble 
poetical expression and breathing a lofty 
and devout character seemed ever to Carlyle 
as "musical as is Apollo's lute," but mere 
versification, the thin piping of feeble 
poetasters, aroused in him only contempt. 
Until after the completion of Sartor he 
looked upon himself primarily as a literary 
critic, and though interest in purely literary 
matters seemed increasingly less vital to him 
in his later work, the distinction formulated 
in the early essays between true poetry and 
manufactured verse continued to be for him 
a valid one. Even in the early years, how- 
ever, he seems occasionally to have wavered 
in his faith, or to have forgotten his own 
distinction. In his journal for January, 
1830, he speaks of poetry as "the jingle of 
maudlin persons" and adds: "My greatly 
most delightful reading is when some Goethe 
musically teaches me." 



46 THOMAS CARLYLE 

The italics show where Carlyle's chief 
emphasis lies. In the essay on Goethe, the 
function of poetry is declared to be the 
revelation of the "inward and essential 
Truth in Art" and in Early German Liter- 
ature the poet is defined as "he who, not 
indeed by mechanical but by poetical 
methods, can instruct us, can more and 
more evolve for us the mystery of our own 
life." Undoubtedly Carlyle here overem- 
phasizes the teaching function, which is 
hardly the primary essential in poetry. 
Not to expound, but to illuminate, not to 
explain the nature of beauty and truth, but 
to convey us into the region of beauty and 
truth, to make us sharers in these things, 
this is what the best poetry does for us. 

A more vital discussion of the subject 
occurs in the State of German Literature. 
Here the purpose of poetry is separated not 
only from that of amusement and sensation, 
but from utility also. It is to be loved for 
itself "not because it is useful for spiritual 
pleasure, or even for moral culture, but 
because it is Art, and the highest in man, 
and the soul of all Beauty." "It dwells and 
is born in the inmost Spirit of Man," it is 



THEORIES OF POETRY 47 

one with love of Virtue and true belief in 
God, "another phase of the same highest 
principle in the mysterious infinitude of the 
human Soul." This is perhaps Carlyle's 
most satisfactory discussion of the subject. 
William Morris was wont to say that the 
customary talk about inspiration as the 
origin of poetry was nonsense, and that 
poetical creation is a matter of craftsman- 
ship alone. Carlyle's view differs radically 
and fundamentally from this. For him, as 
for Wordsworth, it is "the breath and finer 
spirit of all knowledge," coming, one knows 
not how, from the mysterious depths of 
man's nature and without regard to theory 
or discernible law. 

More objectively considered, poetry is to 
be looked upon as the interpretation of that 
Divine Idea or spiritual reality of which the 
visible Universe is but the "symbol and sen- 
sible manifestation." In this invisible the 
poet lives and has his being. "Life with its 
prizes and its failures, its tumult and its 
jarring din, were a poor matter in itself; to 
him it is baseless, transient and hollow, an 
infant's dream ; but beautiful also, and 
solemn and of mysterious significance. Why 



48 THOMAS CARLYLE 

should he not love it and reverence it? Is 
not all visible nature, all sensible existence 
the symbol and vesture of the Invisible and 
Infinite?"* 

In the greatest poets of the nineteenth 
century the actual aspects of life, with its 
meanness, barrenness and skepticism, are 
sharply delineated, yet at the same time its 
"secret significance is laid open," its beauty 
and its spiritual meaning. The poet teaches 
us, therefore, at the same time to know the 
world and to love it. "All is hollowness, and 
insufficiency, and sin and woe are there ; but 
with them, nay by them do beauty and mercy 
and a solemn grandeur shine forth, and man 
with his stinted and painful existence is no 
longer little or poor, but lovely and vener- 
able ; for a glory of Infinitude is round him ; 
and it is by his very poverty that he is rich, 
and by his littleness that he is great. "^ 

For such revelation of truth and beauty 
three things are necessary, the clear eye, 
the loving heart, the steadfast faith. Lit- 
erary men so gifted are to be looked upon 
as a perpetual priesthood, setting forth the 

a Wotton Reinfred. 
b Ibid. 



THEORIES OF POETRY 49 

Divine Idea to each new age in the forms 
which that age demands and will under- 
stand. In our time one literature alone has 
given us poetry in this high sense, the Ger- 
man. 

The various poets are criticised from 
this point of view. Goethe is a great poet 
because he has "incorporated the everlasting 
Reason of Man in forms visible to his Sense." 
Similarly Burns is a true poet, because in 
his heart resides "some effluence of wisdom, 
some tone of the 'Eternal Melodies,' " and 
because he has discerned that "the Ideal 
world is not remote from the Actual, but 
under it and within it," finding beauty even 
in the Scottish peasant's life, "the meanest 
and rudest of all lives." 

Less gifted writers, for example, certain 
of the German playwrights, are distin- 
guished as prosaists and not poets. Their 
art is "a knack, a recipe, or secret of the 
craft"; it is manufacture and not creation. 
For poetry there is no secret except this 
general one, "that the poet be a man of 
purer, higher, and richer nature than other 
men." 

We have seen that Voltaire stands for 



50 THOMAS CARLYLE 

Carlyle as a type in marked contrast with 
Goethe. He fails of being a poet, not 
because he is without intellectual vision, but 
because he is without love and reverence, and 
without faith. The Divine Idea has no 
meaning for him. He lives in appearances 
and not in reality. He is not capable of 
true humor, but only of ridicule, grounded 
not on "fond sportful sympathy," but on 
contempt or indifference. His verse is the 
result of contrivance and not of inspiration; 
it is distinguished by a modish elegance, not 
by universal, everlasting beauty. 

Historically considered, poetry is to be 
looked upon as an expression of the highest 
spiritual attainment of the epoch in which 
it is written, "the test how far Music, or 
Freedom, existed therein"; and the success 
of the literary historian will depend upon 
his ability to discern and record this highest 
aim or enthusiasm in its successive direc- 
tions and developments. Judged by this 
standard the present age cannot be ranked 
high. The poetry of our time fails to dis- 
close "to our sense the deep infinite harmo- 
nies of Nature and Man's soul"; it "has no 
eye for the Invisible"; it worships strength 



THEORIES OF POETRY 51 

rather than beauty.^ And yet, in spite of 
this fact and largely owing to the chaotic 
condition of religious thought and belief, 
literature has taken a commanding place in 
the modern world. The "true Autocrat and 
Pope" of to-day is the Man of Letters, "the 
real or seeming wisest of the past age" ;^ 
"the true Church of England, at this mo- 
ment, lies in the Editors of its Newspapers."*^ 
Still more hopefully may we look to Ger- 
many, where signs of a new spiritual era are 
to be met with, and skepticism, frivolity and 
sensuality are beginning to disappear before 
the return of the "ancient creative inspira- 
tion." 

In criticising Carlyle's theory of poetry 
it must be remembered that it is an integral 
part of a well-considered philosophy. This 
philosophy lays chief emphasis on inspira- 
tion, intuition, and the primary energies of 
man's nature. Just as in religion Carlyle 
minimized almost to the vanishing point the 
importance of evidences of the faith and 
authority of the church, so in poetry he 
looked upon matters of technique as of prac- 

a Signs of the Times. 
b Historic Survey. 
c Signs of the Times. 



52 THOMAS CARLYLE 

tically negligible value. To the man of 
truly poetic inspiration he beheved that 
these things would come as a matter of 
course. The failure to realize how impor- 
tant a part verbal music plays in poetry is 
partly due also to a very defective ear, a 
fact which becomes eAddent in reading Car- 
lyle's early attempts at verse, notably the 
blank verse translations in the Schiller. 

A further limitation was the result of his 
Scotch peasant inheritance. He was bom a 
CaMnist and remained through life a Puri- 
tan. The sensuous made little appeal to 
him. His range of interests was narrow, 
being practically confined to those acti^'ities 
wliich have a clearly demonstrable relation 
to religion and conduct. In critical and 
troubled times he advised the earnest man 
to "perambulate his picture gallery" in 
silence, he execrated "view hunting" and the 
chatter that resulted from it, and he had 
little patience with poetry which ended in 
mere pastime. Carlyle's culture was not 
perfectly rounded, it was too preponderat- 
ingly Hebraic and not sufficiently Hellenic, 
and his estimate of poetry suffers from this 
limitation. 



THEORIES OF POETRY 53 

On the other hand, as appHed at any rate 
to the best poetr}^, his criticism has a depth 
of penetration corresponding to its narrow- 
ness. Such poetry is invested with lofty 
dignity, it is given a definite place in a pro- 
found philosoph}^ of life, and it is shown in 
its proper relations to art and religion as 
a manifestation of the human spirit. Car- 
lyle had himself many of the essential quali- 
ties of a true poet, he knew the tones of the 
great "road-melody or marching-music of 
mankind," and here as elsewhere he speaks 
to us not without authority. 



Ill 

SPIRITUAL HISTORY 

More important than any discussions in 
the abstract concerning Poetry, Philosophy, 
or Religion, is Carlyle's interest in spiritual 
biography. This may be called his para- 
mount and omnipresent interest. The great 
aim of all study is looked upon as the acqui- 
sition of wisdom in the ordering of life. 
The great source of such wisdom is the 
biography of spiritually gifted men. To 
this end all poetry, philosophy and history 
are contributory. These are but different 
modes of manifestation of the human spirit. 
History is defined as the essence of innu- 
merable biographies ; art derives its chief 
value from its revelation of the personality 
of the artist ; poetry should be made the 
means of interpreting the poet. Biog- 
raphy of the sort which Carlyle chose to 
write contains three elements which, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, he seems to have 
regarded as indispensable: the ideal, based 
upon and growing out of the actual, and 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 55 

affording opportunity for instruction and 
edification. A biography may be said to 
possess ideality when it deals with lofty 
character, and when it shows the aim and 
tendency of a life as well as its accomplish- 
ment, and its meaning as well as its external 
activity. It possesses actuality when it is 
based upon ascertained facts ; and it may be 
made instructive by pointing out its typical 
character in relation to the life which we 
ourselves must live and the difficulties which 
we must encounter. Such biography pos- 
sesses the highest sort of dignity and should 
result from a reverent and dispassionate 
inquiry. Sympathetic endeavor to under- 
stand should precede judgment. Readers in 
studying the life of a great man should 
strive "to work their way into his manner of 
thought, till they see the world with his eyes, 
feel as he felt and judge as he judged, 
neither believing nor denying, till they can 
in some measure so feel and so judge." 

Consequently the most important facts of 
history or biography are not the external 
but the internal. These facts are not the 
most obvious and often make the least stir. 
Biographers are prone to forget that "man 



56 THOMAS CARLYLE 

has a soul as certainly as he has a body" 
and "that properly it is the course of his 
unseen, spiritual life which informs and 
rules his external visible life, rather than 
receives rule from it; in which spiritual life, 
indeed, and not in any outward action or 
condition arising from it, the true secret of 
his history lies, and is to be sought after, 
and indefinitely approached." To portray 
the facts of history or biography so as to 
make manifest their true spiritual signifi- 
cance is a task then of boundless importance 
and of boundless difficulty, a fit task to 
engage the powers of philosopher and poet. 
The choice of appropriate subjects for bio- 
graphical treatment is also of importance. 
Two types of men seem especially significant, 
the man who represents some important 
period, national character, or historic move- 
ment, and the man, especially characteristic 
of the modern age, who has gone through 
some sort of moral struggle, with or without 
victory. Of the first sort are Voltaire, 
Goethe, Novalis, Johnson ; of the latter, 
Goethe, Schiller and Burns are the most 
important whom Carlyle studies. This is for 
the modern man the most instructive and 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 57 

precious species of biography. It furnishes 
the spectacle of a hfe nobler than the ordi- 
nary fighting the battle offered to all noble 
souls, and is thus the means of furnishing us 
with inspiration and faith in ourselves. All 
of the biographical studies should be brought 
to the test which Carlyle himself applied, of 
ideality, actuality, and edification. Thus, 
Werner is "a gifted spirit struggling ear- 
nestly amid the new, complex, tumultuous 
influences of his time and country." Rich- 
ter, a still more instructive example, is a 
character heroic and devout, formed in our 
own age through "manifold and victorious 
struggling with the world" and constituting 
a Gospel of Freedom, "preached abroad to 
all men; whereby, among mean unbelieving 
souls, we may know that nobleness has not 
yet become impossible ; and, languishing 
amid boundless triviality and despicability, 
still understand that man's nature is inde- 
feasibly divine, and so hold fast what is the 
most important of all faiths, the faith in 
ourselves." The essays on Heyne and the 
German playwrights are not of importance 
in either of the ways mentioned, and Carlyle 
considered them as pieces of comparatively 



58 THOMAS CARLYLE 

little worth. The formulation of a bio- 
graphical method was of course a gradual 
process and a comparison in this respect of 
his earlier and his later work is highly 
instructive. 

The Life of Schiller is a clear, simple, 
engaging narrative, free from mannerism, 
stating the biographical facts with scrupu- 
lous fidelity and criticising the works with 
sympathy and insight. It has been praised 
by all its critics, and is indeed one of the 
most irreproachable things that Carlyle ever 
did. His own entire dissatisfaction with it 
and later desire to suppress it have occa- 
sioned surprise, and it has been suggested 
that this dissatisfaction arose, after the per- 
fection of the characteristic Carlylese dic- 
tion, which made the early work seem im- 
mature and ineffective. But Carlyle was 
never satisfied with it, and his own criticism, 
"My mind will not catch hold of it," 
expresses the essential truth. If we compare 
the Life of Schiller with the first essay on 
Goethe written in 1828, we shall see that in 
the earlier work Carlyle has not yet pene- 
trated to the heart of his subject, or thor- 
oughly assimilated the facts at his disposal. 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 59 

Many of them are unrelated to any central 
purpose. The book shows skill rather than 
power, clear rather than piercing vision. 

Yet the ideal of what biography should 
aim at is already becoming plain. The 
author proposes "to follow the steps of his 
[Schiller's] intellectual and inoral culture; 
to gather from his life and works some pic- 
ture of himself." As the occurrences of his- 
tory are to be measured "by their influence 
upon the general history of man, their ten- 
dency to obstruct or to forward him in his 
advancement towards liberty, knowledge, 
true religion and dignity of mind," so facts 
of biography are to be judged as they con- 
tribute to spiritual culture. In Schille^ Car- 
lyle first foVmd a mind in several important 
ways representative of the vital experiences 
common to his own day. Here was a pure 
and lofty soul struggling in the midst 'of a 
complex and intricate civilization to find 
an adequate standing-ground for himself, 
whereon he could attain to his true spiritual 
stature and unity with himself. "The Ideal 
Man that lay within him, the image of him- 
self as he should be, was formed upon a strict 
and curious standard ; and to reach this con- 



60 THOMAS CARLYLE 

stantly approached and constantly receding 
emblem of perfection was the unwearied 
effort of his life." He was encompassed with 
many obstructions, and harassed by poverty 
and disease, but he learned to conquer pain 
and to attain to a lofty serenity. This 
spiritual progress is clearly portrayed in his 
works, which pass from the explosive violence 
of The Rohhers through various intermediate 
stages to the wisdom of Tell and the lofty 
beauty of W aliens tein. 

Schiller illustrates also the struggle with 
the modern malady of religious doubt. He 
bears the marks of many a gloomy conflict ; 
he reveals the earnest mind that has learned 
to look upon life as a solemn mystery ; his 
works bear "the impress of a philosophic and 
poetic mind struggling with all its vast 
energies to make its poetry and its philos- 
ophy agree." This high seriousness reveals 
itself also in his love of truth, his hatred of 
cant, his recognition of genius as "the 
inspired gift of God, a solemn mandate to its 
owner to go forth and labor in his sphere," 
and of literature as the essence of "whatever 
speaks to the immortal part of man." 

But in spite of Schiller's loftiness and 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 61 

beauty of character Carlyle has already dis- 
covered that he is unsatisfying. Though he 
struggles stoutly against doubt, puts it 
aside or lives manfully in spite of it, he 
never succeeds in resolving it. "Many of his 
later poems indicate an incessant and in- 
creasing longing for some solution of the 
mystery of life; at times it is a gloomy 
resignation to the want and the despair of 
any." For such solution Carlyle discovered 
then that he must look elsewhere. Two 
sources of help and inspiration are already 
beginning to interest him. These are the 
poetry of Goethe and the transcendental 
philosophy of Kant and his followers. 

The second part of the present work con- 
tains a striking contrast between Goethe and 
Schiller. The one is like Shakespeare, the 
other like Milton; one is Catholic, the other 
sectarian ; one is tolerant, peaceful, collected, 
the other is earnest, devoted, intense, "at 
war with the one half of things, in love with 
the other half." Where Schiller had but 
battled bravely, Goethe had in large measure 
attained. 

The later essay on Schiller, written in 
1829, is not a mere abstract of the earlier 



62 THOMAS CARLYLE 

life, but a second presentment of the subject 
in accordance with maturer standards. 
Here, Schiller's life is treated as a piece of 
spiritual history. The "high purpose after 
spiritual perfection," which is the true end 
of man's life, is found in him as love of 
poetry. He pursues it through life without 
wavering and unmixed with worldly ambi- 
tion. He does not, indeed, ever attain to 
such deep wisdom as that of Goethe or 
Shakespeare. He never learns to discern the 
miraculous in the common, or to find poetry 
in the midst of prose. He does not possess 
that sort of humor which "is properly the 
exponent of low things ; that which first 
renders them poetical to the mind," but 
dwells rather upon old "conventionally- 
noble themes." Less broad in his interests 
than Goethe, his life is nevertheless highly 
instructive from the very intensity and sim- 
plicity of its purpose. 

Carlyle's first attempts to give English- 
men some knowledge of the man whom he 
considered the greatest genius of modern 
Europe were contained in the translation of 
Wilhelm Meister in 1824 and the volume of 
German Romance in 1826. Of the former 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 63 

book we know that Carlyle's admiration at 
this time was by no means unqualified. Of 
the latter he says in the preface that it was 
"not of my suggesting or desiring, but of 
my executing as honest journey work in 
defect of better." We learn from the letters 
that it was done with pleasure and satisfac- 
tion, with less agonizing perhaps than any 
other of his books. 

The preface to the first edition of Wil- 
helm Meister is honest and straightforward. 
As a translator Carlyle lays claim only to 
fidelity; as an ultimate object he seeks to 
further the study of German literature 
among his countrymen. As a criticism of 
Goethe it need not detain us, since we find 
it so soon superseded by the comment in the 
German Romance. 

It is plain from the latter that Goethe 
has now come to represent for Carlyle the 
typical modern man of genius, and his career 
and works to furnish the best image of that 
ideal spiritual life which it is the highest 
mission of all art to body forth. And as 
attainment is seen in its fullness of meaning 
only as the crown of effort and the conquest 
of imperfection, so the wisdom of Meister's 



64 THOMAS CARLYLE 

Travels becomes more impressive when we 
understand it as the matured product of the 
same hand whose youth expressed itself in 
the waywardness of Gotz von Berlichingen 
and The Sorrows of Werther. 

That Goethe manifests the calmness, 
beauty and strength that come from victory 
after severe conflict, that his rest is not the 
result of surrender but of conquest, that his 
is a mind in perfect unity with itself, these 
facts constitute the first reason for the pre- 
eminent interest which Goethe should arouse 
in us. His life gives to the modern struggler 
and doubter the inspiration and faith that 
he too may battle successfully. 

Moreover, the life and works of Goethe 
have an immense advantage over others in 
that they belong to the modern world. We 
find reflected in him the science and the 
skepticism of the age, yet joined with 
poetry and imagination. Every age requires 
that its spiritual life shall be reinterpreted 
in terms of its own, in order to be continually 
efi^ective. By doing this Goethe has proved 
that faith and affirmation belong not less 
to the modern than to the ancient and 
medieval world. 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 65 

That Goethe's final message is a positive 
one constitutes its greatest importance. 
"He is not a questioner and a despiser, but 
a teacher and a reverencer; not a destroyer, 
but a builder-up; not a wit only, but a wise 
man." In this respect he contrasts sharply 
with Voltaire. Here we have already the 
antithesis which Carlyle was to develop more 
and more fully as he proceeded. Goethe and 
Voltaire are henceforth to constitute for him 
two great representative types of the modern 
intellect. 

It is evident from the above analysis that 
Carlyle's object in making his countrymen 
acquainted with Goethe is not merely that 
of a literary critic. The message is one of 
light to those who are sitting in darkness, 
of hope and salvation to men in despair. 
The story of Goethe's life is to bring inspira- 
tion, his poetry is to bring peace. As in the 
case of Schiller, but with far greater satis- 
faction, we are to estimate the life and the 
writings together as the progressive reve- 
lation of a single spirit; hterature is to be 
interpreted in terms of life. 

Similarly the minor German novelists are 
presented to us, not, like Goethe, as com- 



66 THOMAS CARLYLE 

pletely rounded men, but as possessing this 
or that spiritual gift of value. Among 
these Richter is especially significant. He 
too has learned to look upon human life 
with an understanding of its vanities and 
yet with love; to rejoice in man's immor- 
tality ; to interpret nature in terms of spirit ; 
"from the solemn phases of the starry 
heavens to the simple floweret of the meadow, 
his eye and his heart are open for her charms 
and her mystic meanings." The description 
of Hoff^mann is equally interesting as sug- 
gesting certain traits utilized later in the 
creation of the shaggy oracle of Weiss- 
nicht-wo. Taken all together these frag- 
ments of the German novelists are offered 
as a contribution, not lofty, but of genuine 
value, to the study of man and nature.* 

The first essay which illustrates Carlyle's 
mature biographical method is the 1828 
essay on Goethe. From this point of view 
it is the most important of the Critical and 
Miscellaneous Essays. Here Carlyle at- 

a In a note to the discussion of Goethe, Carlyle first intro- 
duces the term Philistine into English literature. His off- 
hand explanation of it as descriptive of one who "judged of 
poetry as he judged of Brunswick mum, by its utility," con- 
nects it with the mechanical philosophy of Utilitarianism, 
which he was to oppose so vehemently in later years. 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 67 

tempts to do in the case of a living man, the 
man whose life has furnished the most satis- 
factory material for such an undertaking, 
exactly what he tries to accomplish in the 
case of Sartor with typical and autobio- 
graphical material. Goethe's hfe represents 
the victorious struggle against the manifold 
spiritual perplexities of modern life. Such 
a struggle "must take place, more or less 
consciously, in every character that, espe- 
cially in these times, attains to spiritual 
manhood; and in characters possessing any 
thoughtfulness and sensibility, will seldom 
take place without a too painful conscious- 
ness, without bitter conflicts, in which the 
character itself is too often maimed and im- 
poverished, and which end too often not in 
victory, but in defeat, or fatal compromise 
with the enemy." 

With these considerations in mind Car- 
lyle's problem is plain. It is so to arrange 
the facts of Goethe's life at his disposal and 
so to present the substance of his works that 
this spiritual struggle and victory with the 
various stages in which progress is made will 
become clear to the reader. Accordingly we 
find the essay free on the one hand from 



68 THOMAS CARLYLE 

entertaining biographical gossip and on the 
other from technical literary criticism. It 
is a bit of spiritual history for which both 
life and works are used as documents. Its 
more important passages from the days of 
Gotz von Berlichingen and Werther to those 
of Dichtung und Wahrheit and Meister's 
Wander jahre are accordingly delineated 
from this point of view. 

Carlyle begins the essay on Burns with a 
criticism of the earlier biographers. The 
usual fault has been to present us "with a 
detached catalogue of his several supposed 
attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a 
delineation of the resulting character as a 
living unity." The true biography should 
aim on the other hand to acquaint us "with 
all the inward springs and relations" of 
the character whose life is studied. So far 
as it is possible, therefore, in a short sketch 
Carlyle attempts to penetrate into the cen- 
tral meaning of Burns' life, and to discover 
the causes of his success and his failure. 

The chief trouble with Burns Carlyle finds 
to reside in the lack of clear unity of aim. 
The poet has great gifts of insight, of sin- 
cerity, of love, but he fails to consecrate 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 69 

them to a single high purpose. His hfe is, 
therefore, one of fragments. Instead of 
making a clear choice, he strives to reconcile 
the irreconcilable, "to mingle in friendly 
union the common spirit of the world with 
the spirit of poetry." This is only another 
way of saying that Burns has not performed 
what we have seen elsewhere to be the first 
great step toward right life, the act of self- 
renunciation. "He would be happy, not 
actively and in himself, but passively and 
from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, 
not earned by his own labour, but showered 
on him by the beneficence of Destiny." The 
poet especially must be capable of the heroic 
life. He has no right to expect kindness 
from his age, "but is rather bound to do it 
great kindness." Burns' failure, therefore, 
was an internal and not an external one, "it 
is his inward, not his outward misfortunes 
that bring him to the dust." 

The interest which attaches to the char- 
acter of Voltaire is not that of struggle and 
development, but of representative quality. 
"He rises before us as the paragon and 
epitome of a whole spiritual period," a 
period of intellect divorced from sympathy, 



70 THOMAS CARLYLE 

of wit without wisdom, of persiflage. He is, 
therefore, no complete man like Goethe, but 
the great exponent of an age of division. 
He is the great Persifleur, lacking in ear- 
nestness, sympathy, reverence, and therefore 
without the deepest insight ; does not possess 
what Ruskin called "heartsight," but only 
eyesight ; Truth of the deepest sort is, there- 
fore, hidden from him. His faculty is chiefly 
one of ridicule and denial, rather than of 
affirmation and construction. On the other 
hand, unlike Burns, he is not divided in his 
aim; he possesses unity with himself, so that 
he ends in a great blaze of success. Carlyle 
leaves us, however, with the feeling that 
Burns, whose life was a struggle ending in 
failure, was a nobler man than Voltaire, 
whose life was an almost unimpeded triumph. 
The lack of struggle is, as a matter of 
fact, in itself the proof of lack of the poetic 
nature. It is the curse laid upon every poet 
that he must endure spiritual torment, for he 
is called upon to "struggle from the little- 
ness and obstruction of an Actual world, into 
the freedom and infinitude of an Ideal," and 
the history of this struggle is the history of 
his life. Men like Voltaire do not truly hear 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 71 

this call at all, men like Burns and Bjron 
hear it, but have not strength to follow it 
wholly. It is only the greatest, men like 
Goethe and Schiller, who hear it clearly and 
follow it resolutely. Our age is an age of 
Halfness, of "halting between two opinions," 
uncertain whether to compound with God or 
the devil. The lives of such men as Schiller 
and Goethe are, therefore, of peculiar impor- 
tance to us. 

These four men, Voltaire, the skeptic; 
Burns, the noble failure ; Schiller, the lofty 
radiant spirit; Goethe, the profound, 
broadly human sage, are four great repre- 
sentative types of the human spirit, and 
together may indicate to us the ideal human 
life as it exists under modem conditions. 
It only remained to select the most essential 
elements in them, to interpret these in the 
light of an intense personal struggle, and 
to present their abstract as the typical 
manly life of our perplexing age. This was 
to be the work of Sartor Resartus. 

But the biographical second book of Sar- 
tor had its forerunners in two different sorts 
of writing in the early period. The first was 
analytic, a series of studies which attempted 



72 THOMAS CARLYLE 

to probe the motive impulses and display 
their operation in the lives of such men as 
most significantly interpreted the contem- 
porary life. These form the biographical 
studies which we have been examining. The 
other was synthetic, an attempt to set forth 
the eternal truth concerning the life of man 
in conflict with the world in forms of the 
higher creative imagination. The first 
appearance of Carlyle's interest in the writ- 
ing of fiction is in the letter of 18^^, out- 
lining the plan of a novel to be written in 
collaboration. The only actual attempt of 
this sort before Sartor, with the exception 
of an unimportant sketch contributed to 
Fraser^s Magazine,^ is the unfinished novel 
of Wotton Reinfred. One of the critical 
essays, however, first deserves attention. 

The first published passage in which Car- 
lyle clearly sets forth as typical the essential 
elements involved in the struggle presented 
in Sartor Resartus occurs in the essay on 
Goethe^s Helena. In the earlier part of this 
essay the drama of Faust is sketched. We 
have on the one hand Mephistopheles repre- 
senting the spirit of Denial, "perfect Under- 

a Cruthers and Johnson, Eraser's Magazine, January, 1831. 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 73 

standing with perfect Selfishness," the Ever- 
lasting No of Sartor. On the other hand 
we have Faust representing the spirit of 
Inquiry and Endeavor, a man of infinite 
aspiration, persuaded that he is destined to 
achieve that lofty happiness for which he is 
ready to sacrifice all lower forms of pleasure, 
quitting the ways of vulgar men but unable 
to find the true light, moved always by 
pride, love of power and love of self. In 
Faust there is no such triumphant issue as 
in Sartor, but the opposing elements in the 
struggle are essentially the same. 

Wotton Reinfred follows in general the 
lines indicated by Carlyle in the letter to 
Miss Welsh of December, 1822. Wotton is 
Carlyle in exceedingly thin disguise, his 
parents are Carlyle's parents, and Jane 
Montagu, while to some extent similar in 
circumstances to Margaret Gordon, is more 
emphatically Jane Welsh. Wotton, hke 
Carlyle, cannot remember ever having been 
unable to read. Like Carlyle, he is a "timid 
still boy," tormented by his school fellows, 
and passing for a bookworm and a coward 
until he flashes forth in a rage of fearless 
uncontrolled anger. His early life is sad- 



74 THOMAS CARLYLE 

dened by the loss of a sister. He enters the 
university with boundless hopes, most of 
them doomed to disappointment. Mathe- , 
matics takes the first strong hold upon him, 
but he soon discovers that his "spiritual 
nature is not fed" by this study. He turns 
to philosophy, reads the French skeptics and 
the philosophy of Epicurus, but remains dis- 
satisfied. He meditates various professions 
and even attempts that of law. Disgusted 
with its technicalities and doubtful of its 
value, he abandons this pursuit and hurries 
into the country, where he undergoes a 
period of spiritual torment and struggle, 
wandering "in endless labyrinths of doubt, 
or in the void darkness of denial." Then 
come the new hope inspired by his love for 
Jane Montagu,^ and the disillusionment that 
follows her enforced separation from him. 
His first desperation consequent upon this 
incident gives way at last to an "iron 
quietude" and the thought occurs to him 
which Carlyle imputes later to Teufelsdrockh 
and to Dante: "Destiny itself cannot doom 
us not to die." 

a The relation of Jane Montagu to the Blumine of Sartor 
Resartus is fully treated by Professor McMechan in the intro- 
duction to his edition of that book. 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 15 

At the opening of the story we find 
Wotton in this not altogether comfortable 
condition, a skeptic longing for belief, a 
passionate lover of good but uncertain as 
to what good is, desiring to act but with all 
his powers of action paralyzed by unbelief. 
His friends, aware of his capabilities and 
solicitous for his welfare, plan to take him 
pn a journey with the hope of diverting his 
mind from its broodings by action. W'otton 
readily agrees, and the story from this time 
on to the end of the seventh chapter, where 
the narrative was dropped, is, for the most 
part, an account of the hero's wanderings, 
meditations and conversations. In the sixth 
chapter Jane Montagu appears again, and 
a very promising villain is introduced in the 
shape of Captain Walter, a former rival 
contestant for the hand of Jane Montagu. 

The story is almost entirely innocent of 
plot and suffers far more from division of 
purpose than does Sartor Resartus. Carlyle 
evidently expects to make the usual conces- 
sions to the demand for romance, intrigue, 
and complication of plot, but lacks both the 
interest and the power of invention neces- 
sary to accomplish this purpose. There is 



76 THOMAS CARLYLE 

not a trace of humor and little contrast in 
character drawing. All the characters are 
in deadly earnest, most of them represent 
some phase or other of Carljle's own char- 
acter, and a majority are afflicted with a 
morbid tendency to introspection and a con- 
suming desire to find an answer to the 
"happiness-question." Their conversation is 
wanting in flexibility and is always painfully 
serious and anxious. Much of it takes place 
in a mysterious House of the Wolds, a 
strange hotbed of dissatisfied philosophers, 
who contend for the opposing merits of 
Kant and Epicurus over their eggs and 
coffee. We are treated to much lofty dis- 
course, but the shadow and sunshine of the 
common human life, which we are accustomed 
to look for in the modern novel dealing with 
contemporary material, is wholly lacking. 
The book does not contain a single feature 
necessary to success in this field. 

As a book of personal philosophy and as 
an anticipation of the author's later work, 
it is far more interesting. Most of the chief 
tenets of Carlyle's philosophy appear in 
some form. We hear nothing of Hero- 
Worship, but the gospels of work, of the 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 77 

renunciation of happiness, of the necessity 
of belief and of the hatred of cant, are aU 
prominent. The style is that of the early 
essays, but many sentences were extracted, 
with or without change, for use in the later 
writings.^ The conversation is largely 
given over to philosophical discussion and 
often turns into sermonizing and monologue, 
as Carlyle's and Coleridge's own conversa- 
tion was only too likely to do. No novel is 
to be nourished on such fare, nor did Carlyle 
willingly turn back from such congenial 
writing to the necessity of forwarding his 
plot and humanizing his characters. More- 
over, as the outline given will show, he fol- 
lowed the facts of his own Hfe too slavishly. 
Wotton Reinfred, if for no other reason, is 
interesting as evidence of Carlyle's entire 
unfitness for the writing of fiction. 

A word must be said in conclusion concern- 
ing the relation of Carlyle's studies in spirit- 
ual biography and their culmination in the 

a Compare, for instance, the following sentence with the 
similar passages in History and the chapter on Natural Super- 
naturalism in Sartor: '* 'The Book of Nature,* said Wotton, 
'is written in such strange intertwisted characters, that you 
may spell from among them a few words in any alphabet, 
but to read the whole is for omniscience alone.' " 



78 THOMAS CARLYLE 

semi-autobiographical second book of Sartor 
to other romantic autobiographical fiction 
of similar character. Goethe of course fur- 
nished the most important model. Carlyle 
attempted, first in Wotton Reinfred and 
afterwards in Sartor, to compress into a 
single volume the essence of the various 
phases of the spiritual struggle presented in 
Goethe's Werther (1774), Meister's Lehr- 
jahre (1795) and Meister's Wander jahre 
(1821). Teufelsdrockh passes through 
Werther's melancholy and sentimentalism 
to emerge at last victorious, having learned 
the lesson of abnegation which Meister had 
taught him. 

Carlyle's earlier biographical studies had 
already suggested to him the four main 
romantic elements which characterize the 
autobiographical portion of Sartor. These 
are, it seems to me, four in number: melan- 
choly unrest or discontentment ; struggle ; 
the quest after an ideal; symbolic or repre- 
sentative character. A romantic work, 
according to a recent definition, "is a record 
of exploration in the realm of the material, 
the mental or the spiritual, in search of an 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 79 

ideal."^ In this sense Sartor is essentially 
romantic. 

The melancholy unrest or discontentment 
which characterizes Teufelsdrockh, and in a 
more exaggerated way Wotton Reinfred, was 
typical of Carlyle's age and has been called 
the mal du siecle. Goethe had found it in 
Rousseau's Nowvelle Heloise and Confessions 
and gives copious expression to it in Werther. 
It was increased by the political and social 
unrest which followed the French Revolution 
and was beginning to find expression in the 
rising French romantic school. Alfred de 
Musset's autobiographical romance,' La Con- 
fession d'u/n Enfant du Siecle (1837), is a 
product of conditions in France comparable 
with those at work in England and influenc- 
ing Carlyle. Both Schiller and the youthful 
Goethe clearly exhibit this trait of unrest. 
The quest after an ideal, often baffling or 
unattainable, is another not uncommon fea- 
ture of nineteenth century romantic litera- 
ture. The typical example is The Blue 
Flower of Novalis, an author who exercised 
an early and lasting influence on Carlyle. 

a F. H. Stoddard, The Evolution of the English Novel, 
page 132. 



80 THOMAS CARLYLE 

Professor Beers has pointed out repetitions 
of this idea in Lowell, Whittier, Emerson 
and others. In Sartor its influence is espe- 
cially apparent in the chapter called Sor- 
rows of Teufelsdrockh. Carlyle looked upon 
Goethe's life as such an ideal quest, issuing 
in triumphant success. The element of 
struggle, which, as we have seen, Carlyle 
considered unavoidable in the noble modern 
life, and which he found amply illustrated in 
the lives of the great Germans, and the 
symbolic and representative character which 
he wished to give to both Wotton Reinfred 
and Sartor, constitute the other clearly 
marked romantic traits of these books. It 
is especially in the last characteristic that 
Sartor differs not only from the methods of 
the eighteenth century writers of fiction, but 
from such nineteenth century autobiograph- 
ical fiction as Bulwer's The Caxtons (1849) 
and My Novel (1853), Dickens' David Cop- 
per field (1849-51), and Borrow's Lavengro 
(1851) and Romany Rye (1857). Carlyle 
makes little use of such picturesque material 
as interested these writers, and prefers the 
a priori method. He writes his story to 



SPIRITUAL HISTORY 81 

illustrate a preconceived idea of general 
application. 

It is also this desire to delineate the typical 
and ideal modern life as a means for edifica- 
tion, that separates Carlyle's biographical 
method from that more commonly in vogue 
since the production of Boswell's Johnson, 
the aim of which was to present a vivid and 
intimate picture of the individual man. Car- 
lyle fully appreciated the merits of this 
great work and of its much maligned author, 
but he had no intention of becoming a Bos- 
well. It is true that in Cromwell he faith- 
fully subordinated his own very definite 
opinion of his hero to the evidence of the 
actual letters and speeches, and that in gen- 
eral his power of vivid portraiture is unex- 
celled. IBut he believed it the primary duty 
of a biographer to interpret as well as to 
present a life. The ultimate purpose of the 
second book of Sartor Resartus and that of 
the 1828 essay on Goethe are identical, and 
Carlyle's interest in each form of writing 
helps us in no small degree to understand the 
principle of selection which governed the 
composition of the other. 



IV 

THE TIMES 

The more intensely interested a man 
becomes in the needs of his own times, the 
less intent is he Hkely to become upon the 
calm enunciation of universal truth and the 
more on the vital utterance of that partic- 
ular side or aspect of truth which seems to 
be needed at the moment. He becomes less 
of a philosopher and more of a prophet. 
Carlyle passed through this change. Toward 
the latter part of his life he found himself 
little moved by transcendental distinctions, 
was even ready to call it all "moonshine," 
but he became more and more vehement in 
his objurgations against sham and his rec- 
ommendations of sincerity and hero-worship. 

In one sense, however, all his writings, 
from the very beginning, may be said to 
have had a practical application in mind. 
The letters, the prefaces and the essays 
themselves show us that the German litera- 
ture which Carlyle was devoting himself to 
making known in England, was looked upon 



THE TIMES 83 

as medicative and restorative, a needed anti- 
dote to the materialism and skepticism of 
English literature and philosophy. Locke 
had paved the way "for banishing religion 
from the world." Voltaire had furthered 
the same cause in France. Germany alone 
still retained a faith in the Invisible. Goethe, 
Schiller, Richter, Novalis, still held fast to 
this faith. Knowledge of these writers is the 
first step to removing the incubus of unbelief 
from the rest of Europe. "To judge from 
the signs of the times," Carlyle had said in 
the preface to German Romance, "this gen- 
eral diffusion of German among us seems a 
consummation not far distant. As an indi- 
vidual I cannot but anticipate from it some 
little evil and much good." 

By 1827 he had begun to analyze his age, 
and to look upon it as a critical period in 
the world's history. His view of it, how- 
ever, was so far an optimistic one. In the 
essay on German Literature he speaks of his 
time as an era of promise and threatening, 
in which "many elements of good and evil 
are everywhere in conflict." The rapid 
material advance characteristic of the cen- 
tury seems on the whole beneficial. "The 



84 THOMAS CARLYLE 

commerce in material things has paved roads 
for commerce in things spiritual, and a true 
thought, or a noble creation, passes lightly 
to us from remotest countries, provided only 
our minds be open to receive it." An elo- 
quent and still more optimistic passage 
closes the essay. In spite of religious uncer- 
tainty we may be assured that Religion and 
Poetry are not dead; that they are "eternal 
as the being of man," Even amid the triv- 
ialities of every-day life we are striving as 
best we may to catch "tidings from loftier 
worlds." "Meanwhile the first condition of 
success is, that, in striving honestly our- 
selves, we honestly acknowledge the striving 
of our neighbor; that with a will unwearied 
in seeking Truth, we have a Sense open for 
it, wheresoever and howsoever it may arise." 
A similar plea for "tolerant and sober 
investigation" of foreign thought, especially 
of the so-called German mysticism, closes 
the essay on Novalis. Whatever its aber- 
rations, Carlyle feels that mysticism will 
prove superior to the "Coffin-and-Gas-Phil- 
osophy" which it opposes. He agrees with 
Jean Paul that "our present time is indeed 
a criticising and critical time," but trusts in 



THE TIMES 85 

spite, of this that it will find some issue out 
of all its perplexities. 

The spirit of this closing paragraph of 
Novalis finds ampler expression in the next 
essay on Signs of the Times. From some 
points of view this is the most important of 
the early essays. It is Carlyle's first broad 
and full discussion of the needs of his age, 
its disease and the remedy to be applied. 
It contains the germinal thought of all his 
later work, and looks forward not only to 
Sartor, but to Past and Present and the 
Latter day Pamphlets. It attracted atten- 
tion, if not widely, at any rate in quarters 
where it was likely to bring forth fruit. 
The St. Simonians, as we have seen, began 
to look upon Carlyle as a spiritual leader, 
and "disciplekins" in London to express their 
belief in him; while Lowell dates the rise of 
Transcendentalism in New England from 
the appearance of Signs of the Times and 
History. In his discussion of mechanism 
Carlyle sounded a note which has been echoed 
by all the great didactic essayists of the 
nineteenth century. 

The essay possesses a high degree of unity 
and is simply expressed. The age is a criti- 



86 THOMAS CARLYLE 

cal one, and is everywhere recognized as 
such. As distinguished from other ages, it 
may be designated as the Mechanical Age 
or Age of Machinery. This mechanical 
character may be discerned not only in the 
great increase of machinery in industry but 
in the elaborate organization in all branches 
of thought and life, social, scientific, reli- 
gious, philosophical and literary. The 
dominion of Mechanism, if made absolute, 
cannot but end in disaster. The renovation 
of society can come only through a return 
to faith in Dynamics^ by which is meant "the 
primary, unmodified forces and energies of 
man, the mysterious springs of Love, and 
Fear, and Wonder, of Enthusiasm, Poetry, 
Religion." 

In speaking of the relation of Signs of 
the Times to the period in which it was writ- 
ten, it may be premised that the essay was 
to some extent an outcome of Carlyle's 
anxious and apprehensive temperament as 
well as of external conditions. Professor 
Masson, in his Life of Chatterton, makes the 
remark that every age is likely to look upon 
itself as an especially critical one. Whether 
or not this be true, it is certain that men of 



THE TIMES 87 

Carlyle's disposition are wont to find a crisis 
impending under whatever conditions they 
may be placed. The author of the Signs of 
the Times is the same Carlyle who almost 
forty years later wrote: "There probably 
never was since the Heptarchy ended, or 
almost since it began, so hugely critical an 
epoch in the history of England as this we 
have now entered upon."^ On the other 
hand, in several important ways this essay 
is an expression of the thought current in 
1829. It appeared during a period of 
anxious and excited thought and discussion, 
at the very height of the Reform movement 
which began soon after the close of the 
French Revolution in 1815. 1829 was the 
year of the Catholic Emancipation Act ; in 
the previous year the Test Act, admitting 
dissenters to public offices, had become law ; 
three years later the great Reform Bill, 
already v/armly debated in parliament, was 
passed. England, indeed, owing to the rapid 
advance accomplished through the French 
Revolution, had been outstripped in political 
progress by the continental nations. It was 
inevitable that a radical revision and mod- 

a Shooting Niagara; and After? 1867. 



88 THOMAS CARLYLE 

ernization of her institutions should take 
place, and Englishmen by 1829 had begun 
to realize that these changes were revolu- 
tionary in character. This gave rise to an 
anxiously critical spirit and to alternating 
optimism and pessimism. Throughout the 
whole period the demands of the working 
people were becoming more and more insist- 
ent. The Luddite riots of 1811-1819, the 
Peterloo massacre of 1819, the Corn law 
agitation of 1825-1846 and the Chartist 
Movement of 1832, are symptoms of the 
general progress. Not only Signs of the 
Times but Characteristics, Sartor Resartus, 
Chartism and Past and Present are to be 
read in the light of these events. 

In October, 1825, the Quarterly Review 
had spoken of the condition of England as 
"a singular if not a critical state of things," 
in which "engines of great power, for good 
or ill, are set in action," but had found sat- 
isfaction in an "almost universal peace 
abroad, and a more than common content- 
ment at home." In June, 1826, the same 
periodical indulges in a eulogy of England, 
rejoicing in her prosperity and prospect of 
future greatness. In accordance with the 



THE TIMES 89 

tendency of the period to apply a nickname 
it speaks of the time as "the age of indus- 
try," "the age of comfort to the poor," and 
"the age of the people." 

By April, 1829, however, the Quarterly 
has changed its tune. An article on the 
State and Prospects of the Country makes 
careful examination of England's condition. 
Causes of discontent are found in the heavy 
burdens of public debt and the poor rates, 
in the redundancy of the population, and in 
the raising of undue pretensions owing to 
past prosperity. "Symptoms now and then 
appear," it says, "which look as if all were 
wearing out, and the present order of things 
were verging to one of those great changes 
to which all sublunary affairs are subject." 

Blackwood^ s for July, 1829, finds no small 
cause for amusement in this sudden right- 
about of the Quarterly. It undertakes, how- 
ever, to examine the causes of the "bitter 
misery" of the population on its own account 
and among others adds overtrading, bad 
harvests, the corn laws and the increase of 
machinery, to those discovered by the Quar- 
terly. In the September following Black^ 
wood's points out the coexistence of immod- 



90 THOMAS CARLYLE 

erate luxury among the aristocracy with 
unexampled misery among the laboring 
classes, the latter largely due to the read- 
justment made necessary by the great 
increase of machinery. In October, 1830, an 
article on The Present Crisis repeats the 
judgment of the Quarterly. "In no period 
of modem times has the settled order of 
things appeared to be so extensively under 
the influence of desire for change." The 
author of this article likewise finds the use 
of machinery raising a "very vital question." 
In December, 1830, Blachwood's attempts 
once more to analyze the "Spirit of the 
Age," an undertaking which "absorbs, at 
present, the attention of the world." 
According to this writer the spirit of the 
age is one of social and political discontent 
manifesting itself among the people and 
demanding certain reforms, chief among 
which are republican form of government, 
reduction of taxes, of pensions and sinecures, 
and of church property, repeal of the corn 
laws, and parliamentary reform. 

A similar feeling of anxiety or distrust 
had been expressed by The Athenceum in 
January, 1828. In spite of the unexampled 



THE TIMES 91 

progress "in everything connected with the 
senses" it doubts "whether we have advanced 
at all proportionably in those higher and 
interior qualities which are of infinitely more 
importance towards the perfection of each 
individual nature, but display themselves far 
less definitely by outward and calculable 
manifestations." The Athenceum proposes 
to watch "the signs of the times" as they 
appear in contemporary writers. All this is 
somewhat in Carlyle's own vein. In a later 
number of the magazine the same writer 
deprecates the tendency of a large class of 
literary men "to seek the moral amelioration 
of mankind by the pursuit or diffusion 
of the merely physical or mathematical 
sciences." 

It was natural that the use of machinery 
should occupy a large share of men's 
thoughts. It is difficult for us to realize how 
rapidly the industrial age had arisen. For 
centuries men had been content to till their 
fields and weave their cloth in the ways that 
their fathers had taught them. Suddenly 
toward the close of the eighteenth century a 
marvelous series of mechanical inventions 
began to appear and to revolutionize every 



92 THOMAS CARLYLE 

industry. The inauguration of the factory 
system resulted in the most conspicuous fea- 
tures of modern society, the growth of great 
manufacturing towns, the appearance of the 
capitalist class, the consequent dependence 
of the workman upon the capitalist, the 
increased employment of men and women in 
manufacturing, and the vast expansion of 
commerce. This great industrial revolution 
began in England and advanced most 
rapidly there. During the twenty-five years 
which preceded the publication of The 
French Revolution the number of power 
looms in England increased from twenty- 
four hundred to one hundred thousand. 
The magazines, as we have seen, made the 
use of machinery a frequent topic of dis- 
cussion. Sometimes they found it a cause 
of anxiety, sometimes of rejoicing. Prac- 
tically all of these discussions were economic 
in character; most of them considered the 
causes of alarm to reside in the misery which 
machinery might bring to the working 
classes, and through their discontent upon 
the upper classes. 

The feeling of depression due to the sense 
of various impending crises was deepened by 



THE TIMES 93 

the dark outlook in the field of literary 
enterprise. The great poets were all dead 
or had ended their poetical careers. Byron, 
Keats and Shelley had passed away. Crabbe 
and Scott had ceased to write poetry. 
Wordsworth's inspiration was gone, Southey 
was writing prose, Coleridge was "involved 
in an eternal maze of metaphysics"; thus 
Fraser's Magazine laments the decay of 
poetry. Various reasons were assigned for 
this, the social and political disturbances, 
the interest in economics and physical 
science; it seemed doubtful to some whether 
the muse would ever lift her head again. 
"When the Pelion of political economy is 
piled upon the Ossa of scientific research, 
surmounted with a pagoda of four-volumed 
fashionable novels, it's time for the invaded 
deities to betake them to earth, and become 
(or appear) 'of the earth earthy,' or perish 
utterly."^ 

Finally, the great scientific advance in the 
eighteenth century had resulted in a more 
liberal and enlightened religious spirit. At 
the same time the apparently solid founda- 
tions of religious belief had in many cases 

a Fraser's Magazine, December, 1834. 



94 THOMAS CARLYLE 

been shaken, and thousands of thoughtful 
men had become troubled and doubtful. 
The natural tendency to materialism conse- 
quent on the introduction of mechanism 
united with the rationaHstic and skeptical 
thought largely imported from France. 
The English deists of the early eighteenth 
century had been followed by the skepticism 
of Voltaire, the atheism of Diderot and the 
Encyclopaedists, and the sentimental deism 
of Rousseau. On the other hand, a devoutly 
religious spirit, though dependent less upon 
authority than upon reason and intuition, 
made its appearance in Germany in Kant, 
Novalis, Richter, and other transcendent- 
alist philosophers and men of letters. 

In these various ways, then, Carlyle's 
essay is an expression of the current feeling; 
in its sense that the time was a critical and 
dangerous one, in its anxious desire to diag- 
nose its diseases and to suggest remedies, in 
its emphasis upon the industrial nature of 
the age and the importance of machinery, 
and in its feeling that the spiritual life of 
the people was being crushed by the mate- 
rial, the scientific, and the mechanical. The 
essay, however, differs widely in spirit from 



THE TIMES 95 

all other contemporary discussions of the 
subject. It differs in its greater breadth of 
treatment and in its emphasis upon the 
moral rather than the economic aspect of 
the subject. 

After indicating in general the spirit of 
the age Carlyle proceeds to point out its 
various manifestations. The prevalence of 
educational machinery is one ; the religious 
machines, such as the Bible Society, sup- 
ported by "puffing, intrigue and chicane,"* 
are another; the rapid formation of scien- 
tific institutions^ is another. The science of 
Mind has yielded in interest to physical 
science. It is supported weakly by the 
Scottish School, but has become for the most 
part materialistic in character. Cabanis in 
France has come to the conclusion that "as 
the liver secretes bile, so does the brain 
secrete thought," and that Poetry and Reli- 
gion are "a product of the smaller intes- 
tines." In politics the trust in the efficiency 
of parliamentary reforms and other political 

a The Quarterly for June, 1827, in an attack on the trans- 
lations of the Bible Society refers to the "glowing terms" of 
praise of its panegyrists. 

b For evidence as to the "growing taste for the cultivation 
of Physical Science" in England as attested by the formation 
of scientific institutions see the Quarterly for June, 1826. 



96 THOMAS CARLYLE 

contrivances is evidence of a mechanical 
turn of thought. Even poetry has gone 
over to an idol-worship of some "brute- 
image of Strength." 

Such are the manifestations of the 
mechanical spirit of the age. More impor- 
tant still is an explanation of its origin. 
Carlyle finds this a moral one. For him the 
ultimate causes of all phenomena are spirit- 
ual, mysterious, profound. Circumstances 
are the product of man and not man of cir- 
cumstances. The prevalence of machinery 
therefore is not the cause of the current 
conditions, but a symptom of that cause. 
The cause itself is the placing of men's 
faith in the outward and mechanical, and 
the devotion of men's best powers to the 
development of this province, instead of 
"applying themselves chiefly to regulate, 
increase and purify the inward primary 
powers of man," an enterprise of vastly 
greater importance. If this is so, then man 
needs only to be rightly directed to acquire 
true spiritual freedom; "we are but fettered 
by chains of our own forging." In the mean- 
while we may begin the needed reform, not 
by attempting to mend a world or a nation, 



THE TIMES 97 

but by setting diligently about the perfection 
of our individual selves. 

One of the ways in which Carlyle and his 
great contemporaries, Ruskin, Arnold and 
Emerson, differ from any other group of 
English-writing essayists before or since, is 
their intense concern in national movements 
and social conditions, coupled with a scorn 
of mere expediency and a strong desire to 
see and interpret the broad moral issues. 
An excellent illustration of this general ten- 
dency together with certain differences in 
their methods of attack and points of view 
is furnished by their various handling of this 
question of mechanism and the use of 
machinery. Each of these men in his own 
way recognizes the danger of the one-sided 
development of a mechanical age, and each 
characteristically protests against it, Ruskin 
because of his interest in the lower classes 
and in art and the artistic ordering of life; 
Arnold because of his faith in the efficacy of 
a wide culture, an internal perfection to 
which the externality of machinery is 
opposed; Emerson because of his absorbing 
interest in individual development and his 
fear that machinery will reduce men to 



98 THOMAS CARLYLE 

machines f Carljle because of his conviction 
of the paramount importance of the moral 
and rehgious life and his fear that machinery 
will turn men from trust in inner inspiration 
to trust in the external and mechanical. 
Arnold and Carlyle especially have essen- 
tially the same thought, and the famous 
passage in Culture and Anarchy (1867) is 
little more than a restatement of Carlyle's 
essay of 1829. When Arnold tells us that 
"faith in machinery is our besetting danger," 
that "our whole civilization is mechanical 
and external," and that "human perfection 
is in an internal condition," we have Carlyle 
reechoed. The possibility of widening the 
definition of machinery by applying the 
term to such things as the national wealth, 
the railways and the coal industries, and to 
religious and social organizations, was also 
first indicated in the earlier essay. How 
clearly is Arnold's very phraseology antici- 
pated in such a sentence as this from Signs 
of the Times: "Not for internal perfection, 
but for external combinations and arrange- 
ments, for institutions, constitutions, — for 

a See Emerson's Works, Centenary Ed., vol. 5, pages 103 
and 163, and vol. 6, page 164. 



THE TIMES 99 

Mechanism of one sort or other, do they 
hope and struggle." 

The essay called Characteristics hardly 
falls within the period which we have called 
that of Carlyle's apprenticeship, but it must 
be included for the sake of completeness in 
our discussion. Carlyle spoke of it in a 
letter of December 4, 1831, as "a sort of 
second Signs of the Times,^' and this is an 
apt enough description of it. Like the 
earlier essay it is a searching investigation 
of contemporary conditions ; like that it dis- 
covers a single principle, that of Self- 
Consciousness, corresponding to the Mechan- 
ism of Signs of the Times, which it applies 
to every walk of life ; in a similar way it finds 
this principle a symptom rather than a cause 
of existing spiritual conditions, and it joins 
a pessimism concerning the present with 
hope and confidence concerning the future 
and the spiritual capabilities of man. 

Carlyle's much disputed principle of 
unconsciousness is an important one and 
will be seen to lie at the root of his whole 
philosophy. Stated briefly it is this, that 
"always the characteristic of right perform- 
ance is a certain spontaneity, an uncon- 



s 1 ' a 
» » J 



100 THOMAS CARLYLE 

sciousness, 'the healthy know not of their 
health, but only the sick.'" Thus, "the 
Orator persuades and carries all with him, 
he knows not how," while the Rhetorician is 
intensely conscious of every trick by means 
of which he should have done so ; true virtue 
is a "spontaneous, habitual, all-pervading 
spirit of Chivalrous Valour," when it becomes 
conscious of itself it dwindles into a "punc- 
tilious Politeness, 'avoiding meats'; 'paying 
tithes of mint and anise, neglecting the 
weightier matters of the law.' " Similarly 
the true Poet differs from the little one in 
his greater spontaneity of performance. 

Applying this principle to contemporary 
conditions we discover the age to be an 
intensely self-conscious one. Instead of 
poetic creation we find men occupied with 
Theories of Poetry; instead of heroic con- 
duct with Discourses on the Evidences; 
instead of loyalty and patriotism with 
Reform Bills and Codifications. The same 
tendency is to be observed in the character 
of our speculative thinking. The very 
existence of Metaphysics is itself a symp- 
tom of disease. "In the perfect state, all 
Thought were but the picture and inspiring 



THE TIMES 101 

symbol of Action; Philosophy, except as 
Poetry and Religion, would have no being." 
Metaphysics is, in essence, a skeptical 
inquiry. The present is in this sense a 
highly metaphysical age. It probes into and 
casts doubt upon all things ; "Faith has well 
nigh vanished from the world."* 

The criticisms that have been made on 
this theory as here enunciated have failed, 
I think, to probe to the bottom of Carlyle's 
thought. It has been objected, for instance, 
that men like Dante, Shakespeare and Cer- 
vantes were well aware of the greatness of 
what they had produced. It is true that 
Carlyle makes something of this point, but 
it does not constitute the center of his doc- 
trine. We must remember once more that 
Carlyle is a transcendentalist and that 
Transcendentalism lays most stress upon the 
value of inspiration, intuition and the mys- 
terious and primary energies as contrasted 
with logic, argument and ratiocination. 

a Carlyle's theory of the unconsciousness or spontaneity of 
the production of any great creative work is reinforced by 
that of Emerson. Their comments on Hamlet, for instance, 
are very similar. Carlyle says: "The Shakespeare takes no 
airs for writing Hamlet and The Tempest, understands not 
that it is anything surprising." Emerson says: "Shakes- 
peare made his Hamlet as a bird weaves its nest." 



102 THOMAS CARLYLE 

What Carlyle is trying to impress upon us 
is, not that Shakespeare and Dante were 
totally unconscious of their genius, but that 
they were unconscious of its processes as 
explicable, namable or describable. The 
processes which produce a great poem or 
a great heroism are unconscious simply 
because they are profound, mysterious, 
spiritual, not technical, logical or mechan- 
ical. 

Consciousness is, as a matter of fact, only 
another name for Mechanism. Men become 
intensely self-conscious when they are think- 
ing exclusively of the outward and mechani- 
cal; for it is only the mechanical processes 
which we can explain or talk about with 
much profit. That this identification is clear 
in Carlyle's own mind appears in various 
passages. "Boundless as is the domain of 
man," he says in the fourth paragraph of 
the essay, "it is but a small fractional pro- 
portion of it that he rules with Conscious- 
ness and by Forethought: what he can con- 
trive, nay what he can altogether know and 
comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, 
small; the great is ever, in one sense or 
other, the vital; it is essentially the myste- 



THE TIMES 103 

rious, and only the surface of it can be 
understood." Again: "In our inward, as 
in our outward world, what is mechanical lies 
open to us : not what is dynamical and has 
vitality. Of our Thinking, we might say, 
it is but the mere surface that we shape 
into articulate Thoughts; — underneath the 
region of argument and conscious discourse 
lies the region of meditation; here, in its 
quiet mysterious depths, dwells what vital 
force is in us ; here, if aught is to be created, 
and not merely manufactured and communi- 
cated, must the work go on. Manufacture 
is intelligible and trivial; Creation is great, 
and cannot be understood." 

Carlyle's criticism must not, therefore, be 
understood as meaning that we are thinking 
too much, but that we are thinking too 
superficially; not that we should substitute 
blind instinct for reason, but that we should 
recognize and cultivate the vital depths of 
our nature out of which poetry and religion 
and all that is deepest and highest in us 
unconsciously^ spring. To those who have 
followed the present discussion this doctrine 
will occasion no surprise. It is in perfect 
accord with all that he has hitherto spoken. 



104 THOMAS CARLYLE 

It is another form of his theory of poetry. 
It rests upon that transcendental behef in 
the supremacy of the Reason over the Under- 
standing which, he had stated two years 
before, constituted, in his behef, the most 
important feature of the Kantian meta- 
physics. "The healthy Understanding," he 
says in the present essay, "we should say, is 
not the logical, argumentative, but the 
Intuitive." It is connected also with the 
constant insistence which we find in Sartor 
and have already noticed, upon the recog- 
nition of mystery, as well as with that well- 
known doctrine of Silence which Carlyle has 
been ridiculed for vociferating "in thirty 
volumes." Whoever, therefore, rejects Car- 
lyle's theory of Consciousness must be ready 
to quarrel with the whole body of thought 
into the tissue of which this theory is woven. 
We have said that the essay on Character- 
istics ends with the strong optimism which in 
the end prevails in all the early essays. It 
is evident that man's spiritual progress is a 
matter not only of faith but of observation. 
No truth or goodness can ever die; though 
the forms perish the immortal soul survives. 
Present conditions need not therefore alarm 



THE TIMES 105 

us. The principle of life now confined to 

the conscious and mechanical will once more 

find its true domain to be the unconscious 

and dynamical. Evidence is not wanting to 

indicate that this change is even now taking 

place. Men are beginning to recognize 

again that God is present in human affairs 

and that the age of miracles is not a thing 

of the past. The mystery of the Infinite is 

still a mystery. The battle of life may still 

be fought with submission, courage, and 

heroic joy. "Behind us, behind each one of 

us, lie Six Thousand Years of human effort, 

human conquest: before us is the boundless 

Time, with its yet uncreated and uncon- 

quered Continents and Eldorados, which we, 

even we, have to conquer, to create; and 

from the bosom of Eternity there shine for 

us celestial guiding stars. 

' My inheritance how wide and fair ! 
, Time is my fair seed-field, of Time I'm heir.' " 

From the above discussion it will be clear 
that the character of Carlyle's criticism of 
his times, like his theory of poetry and his 
practice in history and biography, was 
determined by that spiritual philosophy 
which enters into or dominates every one of 



106 THOMAS CARLYLE 

his important utterances from the Life of 
Schiller to the Historic of Frederick the 
Great. It was essentially a moral incitement 
and to a large extent individualistic. Men 
are to begin bj reforming themselves, not by 
entering into any large schemes of social 
reconstruction. This continued to be his 
position to the end of his hfe. His skep- 
ticism as to the value of any schemes of 
reform, which later expressed itself in the 
reactionary sentiments of Model Prisons and 
the frequent contemptuous allusions to the 
"dismal science" of economics, already 
appears in the private jottings of his jour- 
nal and with less personal feeling in his pub- 
lished essays. 

Carlyle believed in probing deeply, in 
striking at the roots of evil and in strength- 
ening the sources of good. These sources he 
believed to be human and spiritual. The so- 
called economic theory of history had not 
been clearly set forth in his day. But Signs 
of the Times and Characteristics are in a 
sense a partial refutation of this theory. In 
these essays institutions of whatever sort are 
looked upon as mechanical, accordingly as 
external, and in comparison with internal 



THE TIMES 107 

and dynamic forces as of inferior impor- 
tance. Both in this individualism and in his 
moral emphasis, Carlyle, though differing in 
detail, agrees in essentials with the other 
great didactic essayists whom we have 
already mentioned in connection with the 
Signs of the Times. Emerson carries individ- 
ualism to the extent of a sort of philosophi- 
cal anarchism. Arnold, though he strongly 
believed in the importance of the principle of 
equaHty, devoted himself to the encourage- 
ment of the harmonious expansion of the 
inward powers of the individual man. Rus- 
kin saw the value of cooperation and con- 
cerned himself to a considerable extent with 
economic questions, but he, too, interpreted 
life from the moral, rather than from the 
economic standpoint. 

Carlyle's attitude toward social problems, 
though in large measure still valid, seems 
incomplete to serious students of the pre- 
sent day. Perhaps it is an indication of the 
partial triumph of the materialistic con- 
ception of Hfe which he deprecated that we 
look upon the adjustment of institutions as 
of as much importance to the soul of the 
state as care of the body is necessary to spir- 



108 THOMAS CARLYLE 

itual health. "Mending a world" may be a 
task beyond our powers, but social reorgan- 
ization on a large scale is no longer beUeved 
to be impossible. The clamor of socialism 
is becoming more and more insistent, and is 
more and more enlisting the sympathetic 
attention of thoughtful men. At least we 
have become convinced that some mechanism 
must be provided for making moral impetus 
effective. We must look to men of science 
and of practical knowledge and training, 
men willing to deal in patient and painstak- 
ing fashion with matters of mechanical detail, 
to carry out the reform made apparent to 
us through the awakening of the individual 
and the social conscience by our Tolstois and 
our Carlyles. So far as permanent literary 
value is concerned, however, Carlyle showed 
in these essays an unerring instinct in deal- 
ing powerfully with fundamental moral 
issues, rather than with mechanical details 
of ephemeral interest. 



SARTOR RESARTUS 

Anything like a systematic discussion of 
Sartor Resartus does not form a part of the 
present plan. It would be at best a gratui- 
tous performance, since the book has been 
analyzed already many times, and is thor- 
oughly familiar to all students and lovers of 
Carlyle. It will be evident to such a one 
that Sartor has gathered up the reflections 
and convictions presented in a fragmentary 
way in the earlier works and repeated them 
in more compact and striking form. There 
is little that is new, and sometimes the new 
statement of truth is less clear or effective 
than the original. The total impression, 
however, is far more powerful than that of 
any earlier writing. There is still no fully 
rounded or systematized philosophy. But 
the author, by freeing himself from the 
tyranny of facts, with which he felt himself 
obliged largely to deal in the critical essays, 
has been enabled to give greater space to 
the enunciation of truth. The comments 



110 THOMAS CARLYLE 

on poetry, philosophy and religion and the 
criticisms of society and the age appear 
again, not as incidental reflections, but as 
part of the central theme. These comments 
are for the most part confined to the first 
and third books. The first book moves on 
a distinctly lower plane than the other two; 
in the third the author rises to his greatest 
height of poetic power, a height not far 
below the supremely great. All this is 
rendered vital and bound together by the 
spiritual autobiography which forms book 
two, in which the passage through doubt 
and unbelief to the attainment of a tran- 
scendental philosophy is portrayed. Any 
adequate discussion of the ethics and meta- 
physics of Sartor would take us far beyond 
the limits of a short essay. We propose, 
therefore, to point out only a single charac- 
teristic of Carlyle's thought common to both 
Sartor and the earlier essays, and to discuss 
in some detail the mode of its manifestation 
in the former. 

We have seen everywhere in Carlyle's 
work that his thought naturally falls into 
some sort of opposition. Thus he is fond of 
opposing matter and spirit, appearance and 



SARTOR RESARTUS 111 

reality, the Understanding and the Reason, 
Time and Eternity, doubt and faith, logic 
and intuition. Mechanics and Dynamics, the 
conscious and the unconscious, knowledge 
and mystery. In each of these cases, while 
allowing a certain inferior value to the 
former, his chief purpose is to convince with 
all the power of his eloquence that by far 
the superior worth belongs to the latter. 
In Sartor this opposition occurs again in all 
its forms, but it becomes most clearly mani- 
fest and most inclusive in the antithesis of 
two modes of thought characteristic of 
Teufelsdrockh's mind under different condi- 
tions, designated as Transcendentalism and 
Descendentalism, or as it is more frequently 
called, Sansculottism. 

To make this distinction clear we must 
say a word about the sources of Sartor. 
It '■will be remembered that Carlyle derived 
his notion of a clothes-philosophy from a 
passage in Swift's Tale of a Tub, In section 
two of that work Swift tells us of a certain 
sect of philosophers who "held the universe 
to be a large suit of clothes, which invests 
everything ; that the earth is invested by the 
air, the air is invested by the stars, and the 



112 THOMAS CARLYLE 

stars are invested by the primum mobile." 
This is generally conceded as having fur- 
nished Carlyle with the starting-point of 
Sartor. But Carlyle had in common with 
Swift something more than a clever idea that 
the world might be looked upon as a huge 
suit of clothes. While at college his fond- 
ness for Swift's writings and his possession 
of a certain Swiftian power of satire were 
noticed by his friends and he was nicknamed 
"Jonathan" and "The Dean." This satirical 
power which ruthlessly tears away obscuring 
veils, exposes shams, and brings to light the 
practical and material actualities of things, 
may be looked upon as the Swiftian side of 
Sartor. It is called Descendentalism or 
Sansculottism. 

On the other hand Carlyle's thought 
derives from the German transcendental 
philosophy and Goethe. Professor Adamson 
says that "the guiding principle of all Car- 
lyle's ethical work is the principle of Fichte's 
speculation that the world of experience is 
but the appearance or vesture of the divine 
idea of life; and that he alone has true life 
who is willing to resign his own personality 
in the service of humanity." Of his enor- 



SARTOR RESARTUS 113 

mous indebtedness to Goethe we have already 
had sufficient evidence. Novahs and Richter 
contributed detached ideas and furnished 
further illustration of the German philos- 
ophy appearing in literary form. All these 
Germans strengthened in Carlyle the mode 
of thought which we have called transcen- 
dental. 

The clear indication of opposition in the 
words Transcendentalism and Descendental- 
ism is further strengthened by the name and 
description of the hero. The full name, 
Diogenes Teufelsdrockh,^ God-born Devil's 
Dung, indicates the combination in one per- 
son of the half malicious Swiftian satire with 
the ethereal idealism of a Fichte or a Goethe. 
Carlyle calls attention to this twofold nature 
of his hero in numerous places. In the chap- 
ter on Reminiscences the editor remembers 
seeing in his eyes "gleams of an ethereal or 
else a diabolic fire" ; in the chapter on Char- 

a The "secret design in the composition of this most 
uneuphonious proper name" is first noticed in a note to an 
excellent review of Sartor by N. L. Frothingham in the 
Christian Examiner for September, 1836, shortly after the 
publication of the book in America. The writer finds his 
conjecture confirmed by the character of the professor, "who 
is a great radical and seems to be made up of violently 
opposite elements." 



114 THOMAS CARLYLE 

act eristics we are told that his voice screws 
itself aloft "as into the song of spirits, or 
else the shrill mockery of fiends," that at 
times we distinguish "gleams of an ethereal 
love," "soft wailings of infinite pity," and at 
others "some half invisible wrinkle of a bitter 
sardonic humor" so that "you look on him 
almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate 
Mephistopheles." His eyes again are de- 
scribed as sparkling with lights, which "may 
indeed be reflexes of the heavenly stars, but 
perhaps also gleams from the region of 
Nether Fire." 

The nature of the opposing elements in 
Sartor now becomes clear. The one is to be 
expressed through the half diabolic medium 
of satire, the other through seraphic ecstasy 
or rapt contemplation. The one employs 
the faculty of the Understanding, the acute 
understanding and penetrating common 
sense of a Swift, the other that of the 
Reason, the divine vision of a Fichte. The 
one deals with the actual world about us, 
and beholds man in his social relations, a 
man among men, but stripped of all such 
"adventitious wrappages" as disguise his 
actual manhood; the other deals with the 



SARTOR RESARTUS 115 

world of spiritual reality, with the isolated 
soul brought face to face with the divine 
universe, spirit meeting with spirit. The 
one is largely destructive, negative, an 
exposure of the false, the other is wholly 
constructive, affirmative, a revelation of the 
true. The one is partial and needs some 
higher vision to complete it, the other sup- 
plies that deficiency and gives it worth. 
Both are methods of seeing the truth, and 
both are necessary to complete and perfect 
vision. Descendentalism, as we have said, is 
the faculty which enables us to see beneath 
outward wrappings of clothing or the like 
the common human animal, to discern that 
"within the most starched cravat there passes 
a windpipe and a weasand," that underneath 
the choicest cloak there is only "a forked 
straddling animal with bandy legs" or "a 
forked radish with a head fantastically 
carved," and which finds no great difference 
between the star of a lord and the clown's 
broad button of Birmingham spelter. Dwell- 
ing much upon man's common humanity and 
helplessness it leads to a sort of radicalism 
in which the brotherhood of man is recog- 
nized, though approached through the 



116 THOMAS CARLYLE 

medium of satire. The term "Sansculot- 
tism," that is, the condition of being without 
breeches, a term used to designate the radical 
republican party during the period of the 
French Revolution, is an implication of this. 
The idea had been expressed long before 
Swift's time and in a more wonderful way 
than he expressed it. Lear, stripped of his 
power, finds his royal robes a mockery, and 
as he enters the hut and finds the naked 
Edgar, the truth of man's common humanity 
and helplessness overpowers him. He pro- 
ceeds to strip off his lendings, his borrowing 
from the sheep and the silkworm, and to 
become in appearance what he is in fact, a 
poor, bare, forked animal. With this idea, 
then, are naturally connected the social rela- 
tions of man. Lear thinks of the "poor, 
naked wretches" exposed to the "pelting of 
the pitiless storm," and his act is symbolic 
of his sympathy and feeling of brotherhood 
with them. All this Carlyle has in mind in 
his development of the idea of Sansculottism. 
Further illustration of the duality of 
Sartor need be only briefly indicated. It is 
Teufelsdrockh, the Sansculottist, who rises 
in the tavern with his tumbler of gukguk to 



SARTOR RESARTUS 117 

propose a toast to the poor "in Gottes and 
Teufels Namen" ; it is he whose sharp sar- 
casm suggests that the scarecrow, as clothed 
person par excellence, should be allowed 
special privilege, such as trial by jury; and 
whose whimsical imagination has the strange 
habit of suddenly divesting the occupants of 
a drawing-room of their clothing and behold- 
ing them straddling there in nakedness. 

It is Diogenes, the Transcendentalist, on 
the other hand, who alone with the stars sits 
in the watch tower of the Wahngasse, look- 
ing down upon the living flood, hurrying 
from Eternity onward to Eternity. "The 
world with its loud trafRckings retires," and 
he is alone with the universe, one mysterious 
presence communing with another. In the 
deeper speculations of this mood man is seen 
to be a spirit, and the universe to be but the 
Phantasy of his dream. We are surrounded 
by Phantasmagoria; we live as in a dream 
grotto and the very warp and woof of the 
canvas whereon our dreams are painted, 
namely, space and time, are themselves only 
modes of thought and vanish when we try 
to grasp them. To the eye of vulgar logic, 
indeed, man is but "an omniverous Biped 



118 THOMAS CARLYLE 

that wears Breeches," but to the eye of Pure 
Reason he is a spirit, a divine Apparition, a 
revelation of the spirit in the form of flesh, 
dwelling in a sky-woven universe. 

Thus the author arrives again at the 
recurring thought. Everything yields to 
him a double meaning. In the Imperial 
Sceptre and the ox-goad alike he sees decay, 
contemptibility (this is Descendentalism) ; 
yet as the revelation of spirit he finds in both 
Poetry and reverend worth. "For matter, 
were it never so despicable, is spirit, the 
manifestation of spirit ; were it never so 
honorable, can it be more?" 

In this way the two ideas draw together 
for final treatment in the last chapter of the 
first book, in which the unity of all nature 
is emphasized. Not only is all physical 
nature correlated, "the smithy-fire kindled 
at the sun," but physical and spiritual are 
shown also to be one, that is, philosophical 
monism is taught. All objects are windows 
looking into infinitude. "Matter exists only 
spiritually, and to represent some idea and 
body it forth." "What thou seest is not 
there on its own account; strictly taken is 
not there at all." Finally, at the close of 



SARTOR RESARTUS 119 

the chapter we are prepared for the new 
way of taking up the whole matter again in 
the form of human experience by the news 
of the arrival of Heuschrecke's "six consid- 
erable paper-bags" and an anticipation of 
the editor's task in straightening out the 
material. 

It is not necessary to trace in detail the 
progress of the spiritual warfare described 
in book two, but it is important to point 
out that the opposing elements are precisely 
the same as those of book one. The Ever- 
lasting No is not, I believe, to be understood, 
as one critic has defined it, as the "sum 
of facts adverse to the moral order of 
the universe," but rather as the spirit of 
Denial, which, as we have seen, represents 
for the modern man a necessary stage in 
the soul's progress towards spiritual free- 
dom. Divorced, indeed, from any capacity 
for the higher vision, it does represent the 
spirit of Time or the devil. In the essay on 
Goethe^s Helena^ Carlyle had thus described 
the character of Mephistopheles : "Such a 
combination of perfect Understanding with 
perfect Selfishness, of logical Life with 
moral Death; so universal a denier, both in 



120 THOMAS CARLYLE 

heart and head, — is undoubtedly a child of 
Darkness, an emissary of primeval Nothing; 
and coming forward, as he does, like a person 
of breeding, and without any flavor of brim- 
stone, may stand here, in his merely spiritual 
deformity, at once potent, dangerous and 
contemptible, as the best and only genuine 
Devil of these latter times." Doubt and 
denial, however, cannot be conceived of as 
evil except when they are final processes. 
When preliminary steps toward affirmation 
and reconstruction they are means of good. 
It is because the hero of Sartor joins to the 
spirit of denial the will to believe, because 
he is capable of both Descendentalism and 
Transcendentalism, that the ultimate out- 
come of his struggle is victory. 

It is often complained that Carlyle's doc- 
trine of renunciation and duty, which is the 
final message of Sartor, and his ideal of a 
Blessedness which agrees to renounce all 
claim upon the world's gifts of happiness, 
fame or what not, while consecrating life and 
labor to the world's betterment, is narrow 
and incomplete. Doubtless it is so. To no 
man is it given to see and to appropriate in 
the form of experience the whole truth. 



SARTOR RESARTUS 121 

Surely it is enough for one book that for 
thousands of readers it has helped to sharpen 
insight, strengthen veracity and encourage 
devotion of purpose to noble ends. 



CONCLUSION 

The years between 1814 and 1831 have 
been designated as those of Carlyle's appren- 
ticeship, because during this period he was 
consciously dependent upon the thought and 
learning of other men and had not yet given 
his ideas a distinctly coherent and individual 
form. The foregoing discussion, however, 
will make it plain that his later work was 
simply a clearer enunciation and wider 
application of ideas already gathered and 
reflected upon in the early years. There is, 
for instance, not one of his philosophical and 
religious teachings which does not find place 
here. The transcendental doctrine of the 
reality of spirit and the phenomenal char- 
acter of matter, which dominates all his 
thought and is no less important to the 
appreciation of The French Revolution than 
to the understanding of Sartor, is more 
clearly stated in the Critical Essays than 
anywhere in his later work. The ethical 
ideas of renunciation, of reverence and hero- 
worship, of sincerity and hatred of cant, as 
well as the gospel of work, are all touched 



CONCLUSION 123 

upon or fully expounded. Carlyle's central 
religious idea, the belief in an immanent 
divine presence rendering all phenomena 
miraculous and worthy of reverence, is also 
fully set forth. His attitude toward the 
Christian religion as one among many forms, 
though incomparably the highest, constitut- 
ing a continuous revelation of God through 
all ages and to all men, remains through life 
practically unchanged. 

Carlyle dealt with the theory of poetry to 
a far greater proportionate extent in his 
early essays than at any later time. His 
emphasis upon the instructional value of 
poetry, his identification of its ultimate pur- 
pose with that of philosophy and religion, 
and his belief in the sacred character of the 
true poet or man of letters, are repeated in 
Heroes and Hero-Worship and elsewhere 
throughout his later writings. 

The early biographical studies are of 
great value, not only because of their 
intrinsic merit, but because they make clear 
to us the theory of biographical writing 
which he faithfully practised from this time 
on. That the true biography should set 
forth the ideal based upon and growing out 



124 THOMAS CARLYLE 

of the actual, that the external facts of 
history should be treated merely as the 
manifestation of an unseen, spiritual life, 
and that these facts should be used so far as 
possible to furnish warning or help and 
inspiration for the life of our own perplexing 
age, are the most important convictions 
illustrated and expounded in the early books 
and essays. 

A further application of Carlyle's central 
philosophy becomes manifest in an analysis 
of his specific criticisms of his own age. 
The appeal for a more widespread cultiva- 
tion of the dynamical and unconscious part 
of our nature was made to England in a 
critical and troubled period of her history, 
and is to be understood as the reaction of a 
spiritual philosopher against the growing 
materialism of a mechanical age. 

Sartor Resartus is to be regarded as the 
culmination of all his earlier work. Under 
the opposing categories of Transcendental- 
ism and Descendentalism he marshaled all 
the philosophical ideas which he had pre- 
viously advocated and combatted. In the 
second book of that work he outlined 
the ideal spiritual biography, and in the 



CONCLUSION 125 

third he included, in such chapters as 
Helotage, Natural Supernaturalism and 
Church Clothes, his most profound criti- 
cisms of society and religion. 

In working with the materials of the 
present study, the author has become more 
than ever impressed with Carlyle's sense of 
the sacredness of his calling. He worked 
ever in the consciousness that the eye of his 
great Taskmaster was upon him. 

Here eyes do regard you, 
In Eternity's stillness; 
Here is all fulness, 
Ye brave, to reward you; 
Work, and despair not. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 

The chief materials for the present study 
are the works of Carlyle written between 
1823 and 1831, and the early letters. Those 
made use of, with their dates of publication, 
are: 

Works 

1824. Translation of Wilhelm Meister. 

1825. The Life of Schiller. 

1826. German Romance. 

1827. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. 

1827. The State of German Literature. 

1828. Life and Writings of Werner. 
1828. Goethe's Helena. 

1828. Goethe. 

1828. Burns. 

1828. Life of Heyne. 

1829. German Playwrights. 
1829. Voltaire. 

1829. Novalis. 

1829. Signs of the Times. 

1830. On History. 

1830. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. 

1831. Luther's Psalm. 
1831. Schiller. 

1831. The Niebelungen Lied. 



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 127 

1831. German Literature of the XIV. and XV. 
Centuries. 

1831. Historic Survey of German Poetry. 

1831. Characteristics. 

1833-4. Sartor Resartus. 

1892. Last Words of Thomas Carlyle (con- 
tains Wotton Reinfred). 

Letters 

Early Letters, 1814-1826, ed. Norton, New 
York, 1886. 

Letters, 1826-1836, ed. Norton, New York, 

1889. 

Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, 

ed. Norton, New York, 1887. 

Biography, Criticism, Etc. 

Two recent books of especial interest in the 
study of the early Carlyle may be mentioned. 

Craig, R. S. The Making of Carlyle; an 
experiment in biographical explication. Lon- 
don, 1908. 

RowE, F. W. Carlyle as a Critic of Litera- 
ture. New York, 1910. 

The standard lives by Froude, NicoU, Gar- 
nett, etc., have, of course, been consulted. A 
study of the periodical writing in Great Britain 



128 THOMAS CARLYLE 

between 1825 and 18S0 is also necessary for an 
adequate appreciation of the distinctive quality 
of Carlyle's contribution to the thought of his 
time. For the historical background given in 
Chapter IV the following has been used as chief 
authority : 

Robinson, J. H. and Beard, C. A. The 
Development of Modern Europe. New York^ 
1907. 



INDEX 

Adamson, Professor 113 

Appearance, the world an 39, 113 

Arnold, Matthew 44, 97-98, 107 

Art 46, 54 

A thenwum 90, 91 

Austin, Mrs 16 

BaflFometus 31 

Baphometic Fire-Baptism 31 

Beers, Professor 80 

Bentham 43 

Bible 34 

Bible-Society 95 

Biography, see Spiritual Biography. 

Blackwood's Magazine 89, 90 

Blessedness 130 

Blue Flower, The, of Novalis 79 

Blumine 74n 

Borrow 80 

Boswell 38, 81 

Brewster, Dr., his Encyclopedia 8 

Bulwer 80 

Burns, 34, 38, 39, 49, 56, 68-71; Carlyle's essay 

on, 14, 33, 39, 68. 
Byron 71, 93 

Cabanis 95 

Cant 60, 77, 133 

Carlyle, Alexander 13, 19 

Carlyle, Jane Welsh 7,9,13,73 

Carlyle, John 30 

Carlyle, Margaret 1, 30 



130 INDEX 

Carlyle, Thomas, his intensity, 1; an eclectic, 3; 
earnestness, 5; interest in mathematics, 5; 
turns to Philosophy, 6; to German literature, 
6; early literary projects, 6-8; writings 1823- 
1826, 8-9; marriage, 9; period of doubt, 9; 
interest in social problems, 10; egoism, 11; 
growing power of expression, 13; life at 
Edinburgh, 13 ; at Craigenputtock, 14 ; writ- 
ings 1826-1831, 14; gets disciples, 15; a 
mystic, 16; spiritual condition in 1827, 18; 
philosophy, 22-44; a Calvinist, 52; absorbing 
interest in religion and conduct, 52; culture, 
52; attitude toward social problems, 107-108; 
compared with Swift, 112. 

Catholic question 16, 87 

Cervantes 34, 101 

Characteristics 14, 36, 88, 99-105, 106, 113 

Chartism 11* 88 

Chartist Movement 88 

Christian Examiner 113n 

Christianity 23, 32, 42-44, 123 

Church 29, 51 

Church Clothes 125 

Civil Wars, Carlyle's essay on 6 

Clothes-philosophy Ill 

Coleridge .30, 77, 93 

Consciousness 36, 99-105, 111, 124 

Corn Law 88 

Crabbe 93 

Craigenputtock 14, 16 

Critical and Miscellaneous Essays 14, 66, 122 

Croker, his edition of Boswell's Johnson 38 

Cromwell 81 

Cruthers and Johnson 72n 



INDEX 131 

Dalbrook 30 

Dante 1, 74, 101-102 

Deists .* 94 

Denial 73, 74, 119 

Descendentalism 111-120, 124 

Dichtung und Wahrheit 68 

Dickens, his David Copperfield 80 

Diderot 94 

Dilettanteism 20 

Diogenes, see Teufelsdrockh. 

Divine Idea 2, 38, 39, 47, 49, 50 

Duty 120 

Dynamics 2, 17, 86, 103, 111, 124 

Early German Literature 46 

Edinburgh A ddress 43 

Emerson 80, 97, 98n, lOln, 107 

Encyclopedists 94 

Epicurus 74, 76 

Everlasting No 73, 119 

Faust 18, 72, 73 

Fichte 4, 6, 27, 112, 113, 114 

Forms 41 

Eraser's Magazine 15, 72, 93 

Frederick the Great , 106 

French Revolution, 79, 87, 116; Carlyle's History 

of, 92, 122. 
Frothingham, N. L 113n 

German literature 6, 27, 28, 49, 51, 63, 82, 83, 94 

German novelists 65,66 

German philosophy, see Transcendentalism. 

German playwrights 49, 57 

German Romance 8, 62-66,83 



132 INDEX 

Germany, Mme. de Stael's 6 

Goethe, 4, 8, 18, 19, 27, 28, 37, 45, 49, 50, 56, 61, 
62-68, 70, 71, 78-80, 83, 112, 113; Carlyle's 
essay on, 14, 43, 46, 58, 66-68, 81 ; his Helena, 
Carlyle's essay on, 72, 119. 

Gotz von Berlichingen 64, 68 

Gordon, Margaret 73 

Happiness 19-20, 32-37, 69, 77, 120 

Helotage 125 

Heroes and Hero-worship 123 

Hero-worship 38, 76, 82, 122 

Heuschrecke 119 

Heyne , 57 

History, 54; essay on, 14, 85. 

Hoffman 66 

Hume 6, 23 

Humility 19, 43, 44 

Ideal 49, 54-55, 57, 59, 70, 123 

Immanence of God 123 

Immortality 33, 60 

Inglis, Henry, letter to 21 

Intuition 26, 51, 101,1104 

Job, book of 24 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 56; life of, 38, 81. 

Journal, Carlyle's 17, 45 

Kant 6, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 41, 61, 76, 94, 104 

Keats 93 

Latterday Pamphlets 85 

Lear, King 116 

Literary criticism 45 

Literary historian 50 



INDEX 133 

Literary men 48, 51 

Literature 51, 60 

Locke 33, 34, 83 

Lowell, J. R 80, 85 

Luddite Riots 88 

McMechan, editor of Sartor Resartus , 74n 

Masson, Life of Chatterton 86 

MateriaUsm 3, 23, 83, 94, 134 

Mathematics .5, 74 

Mechanism . . . 85-86, 91-93, 94-99, 103-103, 108, 111, 134 
Men of Letters, see Literary Men. 

Mephistopheles 73, 114, 119 

Metaphysics 100-101 

Mill, J. S 16 

Milton 1, 34, 61 

Mitchell, Robert, of Linlithgow 4 

Model Prisons 106 

Montagu, Jane 73-75 

Morris, William 47 

Musset, Alfred de 79 

Mysticism 16, 35, 84 

Natural Supernaturalism 40, 77n, 135 

Necessity 34 

New England Transcendentalism 85 

Newspapers 51 

Novalis, 4, 40, 56, 79, 83, 94, 113; essay on, 14, 
38-39, 84-85. 

Open secret 31 

Paley 43 

Pantheism 39 

Past and Present 11, 85, 88 

Peterloo massacre 88 



134 INDEX 

Philistine 66n 

Philosophes 44 

Philosophy 6, 22-44, 74 

Phoenix 41 

Phosphoros 31 

Plato 24 

Poet 40, 48, 69, 100, 123 

Poetry, 40, 45-53, 54, 84, 93, 96, 104, 123 

Primitive Truth 26 

Quarterly Review 88-90, 95n 

Reason 26-29, 41-42, 49, 104, 111, 114 

Reform Bill 16, 87 

Religion 39-44, 84 

Reminiscences 113 

Renunciation 19, 77, 120, 122 

Resignation 19, 37, 112 

Revelation 42 

Reverence 37-38, 44, 65, 70, 122 

Reverences, The Three 43 

Richter, 24, 28, 41, 57, 66, 83, 84, 94, 113; essays 
on, 14, 24. 

Robbers, The 60 

Rousseau 79, 94 

Ruskin 12, 70, 97, 107 

St. Simonians 16, 85 

Sanctuary of Sorrow 43 

Sansculottism 112, 116 

Sartor Resartus, 4, 8, 14, 15, 17, 29, 32, 33, 34, 

41, 43, 45, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74n, 75, 77n, 78, 80, 

81, 86, 88, 104, 109-121, 122, 124. 

Schelling 6 

SchiUer, 6, 28, 56, 59-62, 65, 71, 79, 83; life of, 

8, 22, 52, 58-61, 106; essay on, 14, 34, 61-62. 



INDEX 135 

Schleiermacher 33 

Scientific advance 93 

Scott 93 

Self-annihilation 37 

Self-denial 19, 32, 34, 44, 69 

Shakespeare 61, 63, 101, 103 

Shelley 93 

Shooting Niagara; and After? 87n 

Signs of the Times 14, 16, 85-99, 106, 107 

Silence 104 

Sincerity 37-39, 83, 132 

Social Idea 39 

Socrates 36 

Southey 93 

Space and Time 38 

Spiritual biography 3, 54-81, 110, 133, 134 

Stael, Mme. de 6 

State of German Literature, The 14, 35, 46, 83 

Stephen, Leslie 30 

Stewart, Dugald 6, 33 

Stoic philosophy 6, 33 

Stoddard, F. H., Evolution of the English Novel, 79n 
Swift 111-114, 116 

Tale of a Tub Ill 

Teaching function of poetry 45-46 

Tell, Wilhehn 60 

Test Act 87 

Teufelsdrockh 17, 74, 78-79, 111, 113, 117 

Tieck 4, 40 

Times, the 83-108 

Tolstoi 108 

Transcendentalism 3, 33-38, 30, 33, 41-43, 61, 83, 85, 

101, 104, 110, 111-130, 133, 134. 
Truth, 30, 38, 46, 60, 70, 84 



136 INDEX 

Unconsciousness, see Consciousness. 

Understanding ...26, 27, 29, 41-43, 72, 104, 111, 114, 119 

Utilitarianism 44, 66n 

Vernunft 36 

Verstand 2Q 

Voltaire, 3, 6, 2T, 37, 38, 43, 49, 56, 65, 69-71, 83, 94 ; 
essay on, 14. 

Wallenstein 60 

Walter, Captain 75 

Weissnicht-wo 66 

Welsh, Jane, see Carlyle, Jane Welsh. 

Werner, 31-33, 57 ; essay on, 31, 41 

Werther 64, 68, 78 

Whittier 80 

Wilhelm Meister 8, 43, 63-63, 68, 78 

Wordsworth 47 

Work 36, 76, 133 

Wotton Beinfred 5, 8, 14, 30, 35, 73, 73-80 



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